This was a talk by Martin Cronjé and Jacques De Vos at Agile Australia 2016.
It was great to see some fellow South African’s at the conference in Australia, although given Martin has just immigrated to New Zealand we aren’t sure he still qualifies as South African 🙂
Martin and Jacques shared their experience working on various legacy systems. They also shared some good patterns for refactoring, and encouraged people to resist rewriting.
Biggest takeaways were that you need to stop hiding your legacy code. Talk about it, make it visible, and consider it YOUR job to clean it up.
Here are the sketchnotes from the talk.
What was their opinion when the legacy system is using in a language that doesn’t support or isn’t supported by modern tools for things like automated testing and Continuous Integration?
They suggest wrapping the legacy system in tests and treating it as a black box, and minimise changing it, rather move new functionality to a new system to keep the old system as stable as possible.
Another way of origin legacy code is to gamify by doing a Code Dojo ( fun way to refractor ) and create team responsibility to get things done . But do t only if you can measure cost of delay of not refactoring
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