Get more out of your legacy systems, more performance, functionality, reliability, and manageability.Is your code easy to change? Can you get nearly instantaneous feedback when you do change it? Do you understand it? If the answer to any of these questions is no, you have legacy code, and it is draining time and money away from your development efforts.
In this book, Michael Feathers offers start-to-finish strategies for working more effectively with large, untested legacy code bases. This book draws on material Michael created for his renowned Object Mentor seminars, techniques Michael has used in mentoring to help hundreds of developers, technical managers, and testers bring their legacy systems under control.
The topics covered include:
Understanding the mechanics of software change, adding features, fixing bugs, improving design, optimizing performance
Getting legacy code into a test harness
Writing tests that protect you against introducing new problems
Techniques that can be used …
Get more out of your legacy systems, more performance, functionality, reliability, and manageability.Is your code easy to change? Can you get nearly instantaneous feedback when you do change it? Do you understand it? If the answer to any of these questions is no, you have legacy code, and it is draining time and money away from your development efforts.
In this book, Michael Feathers offers start-to-finish strategies for working more effectively with large, untested legacy code bases. This book draws on material Michael created for his renowned Object Mentor seminars, techniques Michael has used in mentoring to help hundreds of developers, technical managers, and testers bring their legacy systems under control.
The topics covered include:
Understanding the mechanics of software change, adding features, fixing bugs, improving design, optimizing performance
Getting legacy code into a test harness
Writing tests that protect you against introducing new problems
Techniques that can be used with any language or platform, with examples in Java, C++, C, and C#
Accurately identifying where code changes need to be made
Coping with legacy systems that aren't object-oriented
Handling applications that don't seem to have any structure
This book also includes a catalog of twenty-four dependency-breaking techniques that help you work with program elements in isolation and make safer changes.
Excellent collection of techniques that will enable you to develop test cases for code that you thought was hard to test.
Very code-centric with a focus on object-orientation. Since the book’s publication mocking frameworks (e.g. Mockito) have advanced considerably, so some of the ideas are now even easier to use.
The problem of legacy systems is of course bigger than OO code (databases, COBOL). But for cleaning up and testing OO code, this is a great resource.
