How to save my sanity while maintaining spaghetti code [closed]

Answer 1

The only way I know is:

1. write tests
2. refactor
3. run the tests
4. fix what's broken
5. write tests for the new feature
6. introduce new feature
7. run the tests
8. fix what's broken

You may live through it this way.

NOTE: there are some times where it's really hard to unit test spaghetti code: 3Klines methods which generate HTML, DAOs entangled with business logic, strongly coupled classes... in this cases a good IDE with automatic refactoring (capable of extracting methods, to begin with) and some test tools like Selenium may come in really handy.