>>Changes to ONE part of a monstrously long procedure will inevitably have side effects. Bad side effects.

>Refactoring tackles exactly THIS kind of situations. I encourage you to give Martin Fowler's book (t least) a try. There is life afer spaghetti code. It is called "Ravioli code". Really!

I have the book.
Great book!

Hmm.. Ravioli!

We are in exact agreement.
When you have to work on a big ball of spaghetti, the problem is... it's spaghetti.

Spaghetti code degenerates into a huge number of use cases and permutations of use cases. It is impossible to comprehend the number of different paths of execution, and even less possible to test and validate each case.

I always cut the work up into chunks that *can* be validated.
<g> Now I know I just made Ravioli!

Thanks!
Michael