i totally disagree with your observation. if the code is poorly written no matter what the circumstances were, there is no point in muddling through bad code to fix it. you will simply be wasting time fixing in one place and breaking it somewhere else. and also bad code is not testable. if you are given the task of maintaining such horrendous code, take the time to reverse engineer and re-factor and re-write the piece which needs immediate attention from inside out and at the same time make sure that the new code is testable too. if the new code is not testable a unit at a time that means you still have a "code smell".