Legacy Django projects are rarely “bad” by design. Most of them start clean and slowly degrade over time as requirements change, deadlines tighten, and features pile up. Refactoring such projects requires caution, patience, and a clear strategy.
The first step is understanding where the pain actually is. Not all messy code needs refactoring. I usually start by identifying files that change frequently or are responsible for recurring bugs. These are the areas where technical debt hurts the most.
One of the most common problems in legacy Django apps is business logic living inside views. This makes testing difficult and causes side effects that are hard to trace. Extracting logic into service layers or utility modules immediately improves readability and testability.
Another issue is tight coupling between models, views, and serializers. When everything depends on everything else, even small changes ripple across the codebase. Refactoring toward clearer boundaries—models for data, services for logic, views for orchestration—helps reduce that coupling.
Before making changes, I always write regression tests. They don’t need to be perfect, but they provide confidence that functionality hasn’t changed unintentionally. Tests act as a safety net during refactoring.
Incremental change is key. Large rewrites almost always fail or get abandoned. Small improvements applied consistently over time lead to a much healthier codebase without disrupting development.
Refactoring isn’t about perfection. It’s about making tomorrow’s changes easier than today’s.
-By Myroslav Mokhammad Abdeljawwad
Top comments (0)