How do you refactor a large messy codebase?

Posted by Ricket on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Ricket
Published on 2010-06-05T19:27:22Z Indexed on 2010/06/05 19:32 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 304

Filed under:
|

I have a big mess of code. Admittedly, I wrote it myself - a year ago. It's not well commented but it's not very complicated either, so I can understand it -- just not well enough to know where to start as far as refactoring it.

I violated every rule that I have read about over the past year. There are classes with multiple responsibilities, there are indirect accesses (I forget the technical term - something like foo.bar.doSomething()), and like I said it is not well commented. On top of that, it's the beginnings of a game, so the graphics is coupled with the data, or the places where I tried to decouple graphics and data, I made the data public in order for the graphics to be able to access the data it needs...

It's a huge mess! Where do I start? How would you start on something like this?

My current approach is to take variables and switch them to private and then refactor the pieces that break, but that doesn't seem to be enough. Please suggest other strategies for wading through this mess and turning it into something clean so that I can continue where I left off!

© Stack Overflow or respective owner

Related posts about java

Related posts about refactoring