Modern C++ Programming with Test-Driven Development

8.17 Large-Scale Change with the Mikado Method

From time to time, you’ll need to make a large-scale change to the codebase. Perhaps the code passes a few discrete variables all over the place and you want to aggregate them into a struct. Or you want to restructure a large class used by many clients. Making these changes might require a few days or weeks of work. You could slog ahead with your changes, but life isn’t going to be easy for those few days or weeks.

As you begin to make a sweeping change, you typically uncover more places and things that need to change. You may find that the uncovered changes themselves lead to tangential goals that you must first accomplish. A few days grows into a few weeks or more.

You might even run out of time. ...