I've recently started work at a new company. There are about 5 developers ranging in skill level, and I have about 10 years general programming experience, with 5+ years PHP and OO design.
The current code base on our application is not in a good state. It was inherited from a single 'programmer' who produced it with no forethought or knowledge of programming or design good practice.
The company is expanding, and is healthy in terms of resources. I work for the technical manager, who is a good guy, I think open to suggestion and good ideas.
The issue at hand is that the code base is bad, and I don't know how much thought has been put into improving it by the current team or by my manager. It appears that at least in recent history all effort is going on to adding new features, which involves hacking the current bad code and little effort is put into spending time on structure improvement instead of new features. The code is so bad that there is no development environment and producing one isn't possible because of masses of hard coded URLs. I want to make sure I know what the best way to move ahead is so I can be constructive in terms of my work and suggestions, even if there is pressure to continue rolling out feature additions to the bad code.
I guess I'm looking for all creative comments about this situation - particularly: how have people successfully made the transition from a large bad application to a good new one (and from a large bad functional app to a large good OO app)? And how have people who have been in this situation where there's pressure to roll out new features into a bad code set responded?
Thanks for all info
j