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I would also be interested the thought process in deciding what functionality to refactor. Did you review the code and identify areas before unleashing your tool on it?

With 3M lines of code gone, it must be terrifying to feel that it may have broken something. How did you ensure that it is still working as before?

Edit: Grammatic corrections.

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I had to deal with many sizable codebases of legacy code over the years and even answered a similar question once on StackExchange. Apparently people liked the answer: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/155488/ive-in...

The question was within a somewhat specific context (team of scientists, visual programming environment, etc...) but I use the same approach for all projects. Never reached 3M LoC for a single projet or system component though. More like 1.5M. Anyways, that process works for me. Maybe it does for others.

One approach that's probably quite easy to implement is to generate test suite code coverage by file, and only do the substitutions in files with sufficient coverage (where your definition of "sufficient" might vary, of course).

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