Taking over someone else's codebase

I have been working for Novoda for the last four years before moving to my first startup experience at TradeRepublic and during those times I had plenty of experiences in taking or sharing ownership on new and old codebases. I had my fair share of frustration but also, and that's what's important, satisfaction in reshaping codebases to make them more efficient and enjoyable to work with.

In this presentation I've given first at the March session of the Berlindroid meetup I've went through how I approach taking over someone else's codebase.

The description is as follow:

Android has now been around for quite a while and it's becoming rare to have the chance of writing a new app from scratch in a professional environment.
In this talk we'll have a look at problems that may arise while taking on someone else's codebase, what can be done to have an impact from day one and avoid the usual "I don't understand this code" frustration.
This talk will include both technical bits as well as more generic advice regarding communicating empathically with other developers and making incremental changes leading to a codebase we feel comfortable and happy with.

And the slides can be found here.