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There's a book called "Working Effectively with Legacy Code" by Michael C. Feathers which I heartily recommend. I got it a while back when working on a similar
by lexicality 8y ago
There's a book called "Working Effectively with Legacy Code" by Michael C. Feathers which I heartily recommend.
I got it a while back when working on a similar sounding codebase and it was very useful. It's got chapter headings like "My Application Has No Structure" and "I'm Changing the Same Code All Over the Place".
If your company has a books budget get them to buy it, but I'd personally drop the £35 it costs on amazon given how useful this has been to me over the years.
- planxty 8y agoYes, so good. Martin Fowler's Refactoring is an excellent companion to Feathers' book.
- jschulenklopper 8y agoIt will be worthwhile to know that a second edition of that book is expected to come out shortly.
- ISL 8y agoThis book was written for OP (and many others). It specifically addresses the "there are no tests, what do I do?" concern.
- flukus 8y agoIs there a chapter on what to do if your coworkers don't initialize variables? I just inherited a steaming pile of legacy where they didn't and I'm struggling to understand how they got it to run at all. At least I'm starting to understand why we held off on the spectre patches.
- lexicality 8y agoNot explicitly, no, but it does have some techniques for reading code that might help? Do you mean global variables? I guess it entirely depends on what language and framework you're using, but trying to refactor things to have less global state is generally for the best.