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Asked: 2026-05-10T22:50:39+00:00

I work in a medium sized team and I run into these painfully large

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I work in a medium sized team and I run into these painfully large class files on a regular basis. My first tendency is to go at them with a knife, but that usually just makes matters worse and puts me into a bad state of mind.

For example, imagine you were just given a windows service to work on. Now there is a bug in this service and you need to figure out what the service does before you can have any hope of fixing it. You open the service up and see that someone decided to just use one file for everything. Start method is in there, Stop method, Timers, all the handling and functionality. I am talking thousands of lines of code. Methods under a hundred lines of code are rare.

Now assuming you cannot rewrite the entire class and these god classes are just going to keep popping up, what is the best way to deal with them? Where do you start? What do you try to accomplish first? How do you deal with this kind of thing and not just want to get all stabby.

If you have some strategy just to keep your temper in check, that is welcome as well.

Tips Thus Far:

  1. Establish test coverage
  2. Code folding
  3. Reorganize existing methods
  4. Document behavior as discovered
  5. Aim for incremental improvement

Edit:

Charles Conway recommend a podcast which turned out to be very helpful. link

Michael Feathers (guy in the podcast) begins with the premise that were are too afraid to simply take a project out of source control and just play with it directly and then throw away the changes. I can say that I am guilty of this.

He essentially said to take the item you want to learn more about and just start pulling it apart. Discover it’s dependencies and then break them. Follow it through everywhere it goes.

Great Tip Take the large class that is used elsewhere and have it implement an emtpy interface. Then take the code using the class and have it instantiate the interface instead. This will give you a complete list of all the dependencies to that large class in your code.

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1 Answer

  1. Ouch! Sounds like the place I use to work.

    Take a look at Working effectivly with legacy code. It has some gems on how to deal with atrocious code.

    DotNetRocks recently did a show on working with legacy code. There is no magic pill that is going to make it work.

    The best advice I’ve heard is start incrementally wrapping the code in tests.

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