The person in charge of this project was working on it alone
and from the outside it all looks fine and it's working. So
this makes the higher people think that it's all just fine.
I really don't know what to do. Should I just go and basically
say that this person did a bad job?
It's not easy but it's possible.
The first thing you need to do is get some people on your side, politically. If you just rewrite the code on your own, nobody is going to thank you. You might even look like a terrible employee because you're sure to break a few things, especially since there are no tests to help you.
Explain the problems with the existing codebase, and how they're preventing the team from delivering features.
One idea - give them some easy to understand graphs so they can see how much time's being wasted on the spaghetti struggles. Record your time for a week... show them a pie chart of how much time you spend actually implementing new features vs. how much time you spend fighting with the spaghetti.
Come up with a plan. Suggest devoting X% of your time to reducing technical debt and Y% of your time to delivering new features.
Come up with benchmarks to show your progress. Performance benchmarks, productivity benchmarks, anything.
Should I just go and basically
say that this person did a bad job?
Be very careful about this.
You can explain the bad state of the code without implying that the previous coder did a bad job.
After all, it's normal for software to accumulate technical debt over time. This is especially common if you have a single coder that is under pressure to deliver a lot of features in a short amount of time. It doesn't necessarily mean he/she is a "bad coder"; maybe he/she was just not given time to refactor and reduce debt.
I've already made some comments about rewriting it and the
response was basically "ok".
Sounds like they're aware of the technical debt, so that's a good sign maybe?
I started "repairing" the project but there're no tests to check whether my
adjustments are correct.
This is, of course, step one after you get approval and before you start reducing that technical debt. =)
The first thing you need to do is get some people on your side, politically. If you just rewrite the code on your own, nobody is going to thank you. You might even look like a terrible employee because you're sure to break a few things, especially since there are no tests to help you.
Explain the problems with the existing codebase, and how they're preventing the team from delivering features.
One idea - give them some easy to understand graphs so they can see how much time's being wasted on the spaghetti struggles. Record your time for a week... show them a pie chart of how much time you spend actually implementing new features vs. how much time you spend fighting with the spaghetti.
Come up with a plan. Suggest devoting X% of your time to reducing technical debt and Y% of your time to delivering new features.
Come up with benchmarks to show your progress. Performance benchmarks, productivity benchmarks, anything.
Be very careful about this.You can explain the bad state of the code without implying that the previous coder did a bad job.
After all, it's normal for software to accumulate technical debt over time. This is especially common if you have a single coder that is under pressure to deliver a lot of features in a short amount of time. It doesn't necessarily mean he/she is a "bad coder"; maybe he/she was just not given time to refactor and reduce debt.
Sounds like they're aware of the technical debt, so that's a good sign maybe? This is, of course, step one after you get approval and before you start reducing that technical debt. =)Good luck!!