[jrumbut]

Besides all the great steps below, I like to browse the git repo to find the files that have been changed most recently and most often.

Projects, especially messy ones, often behave like lava flows where there is an active and ever expanding edge where changes are currently being made. Beneath this are layer upon layer of nearly impenetrable and often implicitly deprecated code from former developers.

This practice came from a time when I was brought in midway through a rewrite to get rid of unmaintainable code from some offshore contractors. I saw a repository where half the code lacked any organizing principles and had massive security issues. The second half was textbook (pedantic even) OOP, the kind taught in Java textbooks. It was beautifully executed except for using a few outdated tricks to do OOP in early versions of PHP (no longer needed in the version used for this project).

Because I didn't look at the dates, I assumed the neat OOP code was the result of the rewrite. I was wrong.