Mina Markham on refactoring a large and complex codebase into an agile design system, slowly over time:
If you’re not lucky enough to be able to start a new design system from scratch, you can start small and work on a single feature or component. With each new project comes a new opportunity to flesh out a new part of the system, and another potential case study to secure buy-in and showcase its value. Make sure to carefully and thoroughly document each new portion of the system as it’s built. After a few projects, you’ll find yourself with a decent start to a design system.
As a side note, Mina’s point here also reminds me of an old blog post called “Things You Should Never Do” by Joel Spolsky where he talks about how all this work and all this code you feel you needs to be refactored is actually solving a problem. Deleting everything and starting from scratch is almost never a good idea:
When you throw away code and start from scratch, you are throwing away all that knowledge. All those collected bug fixes. Years of programming work.
I’m not entirely sure that Joel’s piece about programming fits snuggly with Mina’s point but I think it’s an interesting one to make nonetheless: new code doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s better.
