[umut]

I second this rather strongly.. The harder it gets to "stop" and clean-up shit, the quicker it gets to just lose it.. Especially relevant in environments where the authors of the write-only codebase are not around anymore. Somehow it is hard to blame/hate someone you go out with for lunch or beers.

What really worked great for my teams in the past is to game the transition so that the team as a whole sees it as an internalized mission, usually much stronger than that of the company. Then killing X lines of code from the old mess and beautifying the codebase becomes a shared and extremely satisfying exercise