by Alvin Ashcraft

Last week we published another session from last November's TechBash 2019 event in the Poconos. Subscribe to our channel today to get notified when we publish new videos.

Gene Gotimer - Get to Green: How to safely refactor legacy code

For many of us, legacy code is a fact of life. Code without tests -- no safe way to make changes, no safety net, no hope of untangling the web of accumulated ugliness, an incomplete understanding (or less) of how it really behaves. And your next set of changes is just going to add to the garbage pile and make it worse. You need tests so you can safely make changes, but you can't add tests without changing the code. It is a chicken-and-egg problem.

So how do you turn legacy code into code you can change confidently? Slowly, one step at a time. Join Gene as he shares his experiences working with a monolithic codebase that was so bad it made national news. He'll go over the steps he and his team used to refactor the code safely by using mocking frameworks, mutation testing, and patience to build an understanding of how the code worked so that they could change it confidently.

This talk is for anyone that has inherited legacy code that they aren't confident in and wants to make it something they can work on and improve. You'll leave with some tools and techniques that will help you change your legacy code into something maintainable.