I've inherited responsibilities for maintaining a section of enterprise intranet, and my manager has tasked me with, "Clean up the code, please. We're probably going to get lots of change requests next quarter and I'd like things to be in good shape."
Upon looking at the code, I've found it difficult to work with. There are lots of copy-pasted source files, race conditions, jQuery spaghetti, substandard SCM, and lots of little <script> and <link> tags making for long page load times. Cookies and global variables are set in one of a hundred files and may or may not be referenced in another.
I'm happy to dive into this head-first and try to fix (or rewrite) everything, but I'd like to fix the worst problems first.
What metrics should I use to document, benchmark, and otherwise quantify and qualify the "as-is" state of a website, both in order to prioritize my own work and to presentjustify my resultsactions to managementmy manager? My manager is tech-savvy but not a professional programmer. He contributed to some of the code, then hired me to take over.
I'm not asking about how to deal effectively with legacy code; that's been asked before. I'd like to know what benchmarks are specifically helpful when dealing with legacy web development.