It would be nice if some research institution would pay for the rehabilitation of some huge, bloated, ancient, but relatively unimportant app. Ideally by independent teams in parallel.
Just to get some real data on what works, rather than anecdotes from veterans.
Your comment opened my eyes. Considering the importance of software development in today's world ( and tomorrow's), the fact that those best practices or code management technics are found mostly in blogs, instead of scientific papers with proper experiments, tells a lot.
There is a strong field exploring this subject, but it's called 'software verification'. Here's a paper on automated defect detection [0], which is effectively a study on how to write good tests.
Have you heard of the term/phrase "bro science" with respect to weight lifting? I'd draw an analogy between them.
Clarification: what I mean is there is a lot of ad-hoc stuff in these blogs that may be narrowly true or applicable to a given project or subset of a domain, but generally there is either significant evidence against some of these blogs' contents or the contents themselves have absolutely no formal, rigorous support.
I see your point, thanks. But the fact that not a lot of research is done in this field doesn't tell you much about the validity of the non-scientific blogosphere findings, right?
I think the pain in refactoring is not the refactoring itself, it's the weeks spent creating a mental map of a foreign and architecturally broken codebase (but which sorta works). Even to write the non-reg tests before even considering the refactor, much time must be spent becoming an expert in something that will die soon.
Just to get some real data on what works, rather than anecdotes from veterans.