In a new post to his site Matthias Noback takes a look at legacy applications and two things that most of them seem to have in common: classes that are too large and too generic methods. In this post he discusses these two topics and some of the tactics you can use to help refactor and resolve them.

I find it very curious that legacy (PHP) code often has the following characteristics:

• Classes with the name of a central domain concept have grown too large.
• Methods in these classes have become very generic.

He starts by tackling the "classes too large" problem, suggesting that it's usually just a matter of developers slowly adding to existing functionality rather than introducing large chunks of code all at once. Moving on to the "generic methods" issue, he lays out a common scenario showing how a method evolves over time to repurpose it for other uses thank its original intent. He recommends "taking a step back" and picking apart the code to make the functionality more specific in the places it's used.