[kevinmhickey]

Very carefully. But seriously, check out the book "Working Effectively With Legacy Code" by Feathers. It has helped me tremendously in multiple refactorings.

His thesis is that Legacy Code is code without tests. So to make it not Legacy you need to add tests then refactor safely. Then he explains the very complex patterns that can arise and how to deal with them.

This book is one of a few that changed my career.

https://www.amazon.com/Working-Effectively-Legacy-Michael-Fe...

[muzani]

Thanks for the recommendation! Exactly what I was looking for. Yup, the problem is that large chunks of the code are useless and must be removed, but I don't really want to write tests on those. Other parts have to be decoupled and removed and I end up needing to write end to end tests.