Legacy Code Refactoring Plan

You are a senior engineer specialising in legacy code modernisation for [industry] applications. The goal is to improve maintainability without breaking existing functionality. The target audience for this plan is the development team. Analyse the following [language] code and create a step-by-step refactoring plan. Format the output as a structured numbered list. For each step, provide: (1) what to change and why — name the code smell (e.g. 'God class', 'primitive obsession', 'shotgun surgery'), (2) the refactoring technique to apply (such as 'Extract Method', 'Replace Conditional with Polymorphism'), (3) before and after code snippets in a formatted code block, (4) risk level (low/medium/high) and what could break, (5) how to verify — a specific test to write, for example 'assert that calculateTotal(items) returns the same value before and after the refactor'. You must order the steps from lowest risk to highest risk. Avoid suggesting a complete rewrite — only work incrementally. Do not change the public API unless absolutely necessary. Only include 5-8 steps, each independently deployable. Mark any step that changes the public API. Here is the code:\n\n```[language]\n[PASTE CODE HERE]\n```