[AstralStorm]

Incremental approach only works if the code was not that bad to begin with (properly modular, mostly SOLID, no need for major rework) and when you have unit tests.

Plus it is folly to attempt rework while writing features based on the old, broken code.

[jat850]

I agree. We were lucky (not smart, I'd say, just lucky) in the sense that we turned on PMD as a CI portion prior to a lot of major code being written. To share one experience of my own, I wrote an entire application - not a major one, probably < 2000 LOC altogether - right when we were midstream.

I began by ignoring PMD's presence (it wasn't blocking my work at the time) and merrily went about writing the code. Right when I was nearly finished the application, PMD went live and I ended up realizing - with PMDs help, code review, input from more experienced devs in the domain - that my code was shit - poorly structured, not very testable, not following great design principles - and as a result I re-wrote the entire thing. It wasn't time-costly but it was an eye-opening lesson - getting some things right off the bat is important and saves a lot of headache later.

If we'd had more code like mine in place at the time PMD went live we'd have spent an order of magnitude more time re-writing so many things, in many cases nearly from the ground up.

Even the initial effort caused a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth, but in truth it did help us learn and improve more quickly than if we'd kept left to our own devices.