Improve Your Software Project - Part Two: Making Changes

You can take over a codebase that's not happy with its current state by refactoring and enhancing it, making changes such as restructuring the project to improve its overall architecture and grouping similar functionality into modules. You should also consider branches in your version control system, where you might find features or enhancements that were developed separately from the main branch, and understand what makes a good dependency, including considering the license, maintenance, popularity, and supporting assets. When testing code, scope your testing to only test how your code sends and receives data, assuming that other software does its job correctly, sending success and error responses for your code to process. You should also use semantic versioning when making new releases, updating supplementary materials such as changelogs, READMEs, and code samples to reflect the changes in the latest version. Additionally, you need to be comfortable advocating for yourself and your work, setting expectations that part of your time needs to be spent on improving the legacy codebase, which will help you understand the codebase and pay dividends later on.