I agree with you, I don't know why you were downvoted. In my experience the first and biggest problem when taking over legacy codebases is the lack of knowledge

I agree with you, I don't know why you were downvoted. In my experience the first and biggest problem when taking over legacy codebases is the lack of knowledge of what features the code is supposed to support. Just starting out with writing integration test has a risk that you end up with even more meaningless code to maintain. Actually, contrary to the advise of the writer, I like to start out with fixing some bugs. I find it a great way to gain some knowledge and it has the added benefit of keeping business stakeholders happy. And while fixing those bugs you can start writing the first integration and unit tests.