How do you overcome your own coding biases when handed legacy code?

Posted by Bryan M. on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Bryan M.
Published on 2010-09-15T18:28:12Z Indexed on 2011/06/23 8:29 UTC
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Filed under:

experience

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development-process

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code-quality

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coding-standards

As programmers, we often take incredible pride in our skills and hold very strong opinions about what is 'good' code and 'bad' code.

At any given point in our careers, we've probably had some legacy system dropped in our laps, and thought 'My god, this code sucks!' because it didn't fit into our notion of what good code should be, despite the fact that it may have well been perfectly functional, maintainable code.

How do you prepare yourself mentally when trying to get your head around another programmer's work?

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