this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2026
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Programming

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Use the Mikado Method to do safe changes in a complex codebase - Change Messy Software Without Breaking It (understandlegacycode.com)
submitted 3 days ago by HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org to c/programming@programming.dev
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[–] Redkey@programming.dev 11 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

The Mikado Method, eh?

(All together) Three junior devs at work are we,
Busy and harried as devs can be,
Compiler warnings flowing freely,
Three junior devs at work!

(Alice) Everything is a source of bugs! (Laughter)

(Bob) When they wrote this, were they on drugs? (Laughter)

(Carlos) Don't touch our "World's Best Coder" mugs! (Laughter)

(All together) Three junior devs at work!

[–] HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org 7 points 2 days ago

You have to imagine Alice, Bob, and Carlos 25 years later, working on production code that was created like this.

XKCD on this: https://m.xkcd.com/2730/

By the way, I am currently working on a 20 year old code base that was in production use all the years and was continuously adapted. At least the people who wrote this were (more or less) knowing what they were doing. I guess I should ask for a pay rise...

[–] villainy@lemmy.world 13 points 3 days ago

You’ve inherited a 300k lines of spaghetti code. What do you do now?

Quit.

NGL this Mikado Method sounds pretty good 😉

[–] thenextguy@lemmy.world 9 points 3 days ago (3 children)

I’m not a tdd guy, but I would reach for tests first. You don’t know the code yet. Testing is the only way to stay sane. And writing the tests if they don’t exist yet will help you learn the code.

[–] kibiz0r@midwest.social 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Yes, but you do need to be careful with what level you test at. Too high level and the tests may be slow, flaky, and difficult to focus onto small details. Too low level and they may just bake-in the existing implementation.

[–] thenextguy@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago

That was such a huge problem on my last job. Most of the unit tests just executed the code and didn’t really test anything and any time you changed the implementation everything broke.

Thankfully it was truly my last job. 😊

[–] HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

The thing is... to test such code, you often need to modify it first.

You see the problem?

[–] thenextguy@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

No. I don't grant your premise.

[–] dandi8@fedia.io 1 points 2 days ago

I think this is compatible with TDD. It's just fancy divide-and-conquer.