by Steve Barnes for EuroPython 2012
Some developers will leave all the code in a single file, containing a single object, that will be several thousand lines long, contain no structure, no documentation and in the long term will give more problems for bug fixing and maintenance than anything else. Unfortunately, fully re-factoring such code in a single pass is time consuming and hard to make a business case for. In this talk I intend to cover some tricks and tools to aid incremental re-factoring of such code into more structured, maintainable, code whereby each step, at minimum, retains the full functionality of the existing code and usually either removes bugs or provides opportunities to add functionality to the existing code.