Any good response to your post will require significantly more information.

Here are a few questions to start with:

  1. How much code? Are we talking less than a few thousand lines, 20,000+, or somewhere inbetween?
  2. What type of code? Is the language still in active development?
  3. What are you skills? Are you capable of making reliable modifications to the code? Do you know the language well, or just enough to rename variables?
  4. Who owns the code Does it belong to a company or an individual? Is it open source? How resistant is the company to change?
  5. What is the owner's current focus Have they switched all new development to a different platform and/or language? Are they in the process of migrating any other code from the same eroa over?
  6. What is the purpose of the code Is it for a pacemaker or an mp3 player? What level of quality is required.
  7. How well does the code work? Have many bugs been found in the past? Are there an unresolved known problems? How extensively is it tested/used?
  8. How much other code is dependant on it? Can you change the interface? Is it so obscure that you can't tell what the interface is?
  9. How well is it documented? How much do you know about the code's purpose? The interface? Internal workings?

That's a start anyways. These things are extremely dependant on the details, carefully examine any advice that claims to be a silver bullet.

Best of luck.

In reply to Re: Difficult code (Resolutions) by Anonymous Monk
in thread Difficult code (Resolutions) by xChauncey

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