Working Effectively with Legacy Code

Working Effectively with Legacy Code
Author: Michael Feathers
Publisher: Prentice Hall Professional
Total Pages: 457
Release: 2004-09-22
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0132931753

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.

The Legacy Code Programmer's Toolbox

The Legacy Code Programmer's Toolbox
Author: Jonathan Boccara
Publisher:
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2019-09-21
Genre:
ISBN: 9781691064137

"This is a warm and reassuring book that will equip you to read, understand, and update legacy code in any language." --Kate Gregory "It is easy to forget that outside the world of software development, the word legacy has another meaning. A positive meaning, a gift of wealth from the past to the present for the future. This book will help you reclaim the word." --Kevlin Henney If you're like most software developers, you have to deal with legacy code. But working with legacy code is challenging! This book will teach you how to be happy, efficient and successful when working with legacy code. Here are the skills that The Legacy Code Programmer's Toolbox will teach you: - how to deal with legacy code efficiently and with a positive approach, - 10 techniques how to understand legacy code, - 5 ways to reduce the size of long functions, - a technique to turn legacy code to your advantage to improve your programming skills, - how to be in a motivated mindset, - the power of knowledge of your codebase, how to acquire it and make every person in your team acquire it too, - how to find the source of a bug quickly in a large and unfamiliar codebase, - where to focus your refactoring efforts so that they make your life easier, - and many more things to be efficient and happy when working with legacy code!

Extreme Programming and Agile Methods - XP/Agile Universe 2004

Extreme Programming and Agile Methods - XP/Agile Universe 2004
Author: Carmen Zannier
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2004-08-03
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 354022839X

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th Conference on Extreme Programming and Agile Methods, XP/Agile Universe 2004, held in Calgary, Canada in August 2004. The 18 revised full papers presented together with summaries of workshops, panels, and tutorials were carefully reviewed and selected from 45 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on testing and integration, managing requirements and usability, pair programming, foundations of agility, process adaptation, and educational issues.

Brutal Refactoring

Brutal Refactoring
Author: Michael Feathers
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2013-01-01
Genre:
ISBN: 9780321793201

Code That Fits in Your Head

Code That Fits in Your Head
Author: Mark Seemann
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Total Pages: 628
Release: 2021-11-02
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0137464355

How to Reduce Code Complexity and Develop Software More Sustainably "Mark Seemann is well known for explaining complex concepts clearly and thoroughly. In this book he condenses his wide-ranging software development experience into a set of practical, pragmatic techniques for writing sustainable and human-friendly code. This book will be a must-read for every programmer." -- Scott Wlaschin, author of Domain Modeling Made Functional Code That Fits in Your Head offers indispensable, practical advice for writing code at a sustainable pace and controlling the complexity that causes projects to spin out of control. Reflecting decades of experience helping software teams succeed, Mark Seemann guides you from zero (no code) to deployed features and shows how to maintain a good cruising speed as you add functionality, address cross-cutting concerns, troubleshoot, and optimize. You'll find valuable ideas, practices, and processes for key issues ranging from checklists to teamwork, encapsulation to decomposition, API design to unit testing. Seemann illuminates his insights with code examples drawn from a complete sample project. Written in C#, they're designed to be clear and useful to anyone who uses any object-oriented language including Java , C++, and Python. To facilitate deeper exploration, all code and extensive commit messages are available for download. Choose mindsets and processes that work, and escape bad metaphors that don't Use checklists to liberate yourself, improving outcomes with the skills you already have Get past “analysis paralysis” by creating and deploying a vertical slice of your application Counteract forces that lead to code rot and unnecessary complexity Master better techniques for changing code behavior Discover ways to solve code problems more quickly and effectively Think more productively about performance and security If you've ever suffered through bad projects or had to cope with unmaintainable legacy code, this guide will help you make things better next time and every time. Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.

The Software Craftsman

The Software Craftsman
Author: Sandro Mancuso
Publisher: Pearson Education
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2014-12-14
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0134052501

In The Software Craftsman, Sandro Mancuso explains what craftsmanship means to the developer and his or her organization, and shows how to live it every day in your real-world development environment. Mancuso shows how software craftsmanship fits with and helps students improve upon best-practice technical disciplines such as agile and lean, taking all development projects to the next level. Readers will learn how to change the disastrous perception that software developers are the same as factory workers, and that software projects can be run like factories.

Software Design X-Rays

Software Design X-Rays
Author: Adam Tornhill
Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2018-03-08
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1680505807

Are you working on a codebase where cost overruns, death marches, and heroic fights with legacy code monsters are the norm? Battle these adversaries with novel ways to identify and prioritize technical debt, based on behavioral data from how developers work with code. And that's just for starters. Because good code involves social design, as well as technical design, you can find surprising dependencies between people and code to resolve coordination bottlenecks among teams. Best of all, the techniques build on behavioral data that you already have: your version-control system. Join the fight for better code! Use statistics and data science to uncover both problematic code and the behavioral patterns of the developers who build your software. This combination gives you insights you can't get from the code alone. Use these insights to prioritize refactoring needs, measure their effect, find implicit dependencies between different modules, and automatically create knowledge maps of your system based on actual code contributions. In a radical, much-needed change from common practice, guide organizational decisions with objective data by measuring how well your development teams align with the software architecture. Discover a comprehensive set of practical analysis techniques based on version-control data, where each point is illustrated with a case study from a real-world codebase. Because the techniques are language neutral, you can apply them to your own code no matter what programming language you use. Guide organizational decisions with objective data by measuring how well your development teams align with the software architecture. Apply research findings from social psychology to software development, ensuring you get the tools you need to coach your organization towards better code. If you're an experienced programmer, software architect, or technical manager, you'll get a new perspective that will change how you work with code. What You Need: You don't have to install anything to follow along in the book. TThe case studies in the book use well-known open source projects hosted on GitHub. You'll use CodeScene, a free software analysis tool for open source projects, for the case studies. We also discuss alternative tooling options where they exist.

Beyond Legacy Code

Beyond Legacy Code
Author: David Scott Bernstein
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015
Genre: Application software
ISBN: 9781680500790

We're losing tens of billions of dollars a year on broken software, and great new ideas such as agile development and Scrum don't always pay off. But there's hope. The nine software development practices in Beyond Legacy Code are designed to solve the problems facing our industry. Discover why these practices work, not just how they work, and dramatically increase the quality and maintainability of any software project. These nine practices could save the software industry. Beyond Legacy Code is filled with practical, hands-on advice and a common-sense exploration of why technical practices such as refactoring and test-first development are critical to building maintainable software. Discover how to avoid the pitfalls teams encounter when adopting these practices, and how to dramatically reduce the risk associated with building software--realizing significant savings in both the short and long term. With a deeper understanding of the principles behind the practices, you'll build software that's easier and less costly to maintain and extend. By adopting these nine key technical practices, you'll learn to say what, why, and for whom before how; build in small batches; integrate continuously; collaborate; create CLEAN code; write the test first; specify behaviors with tests; implement the design last; and refactor legacy code. Software developers will find hands-on, pragmatic advice for writing higher quality, more maintainable, and bug-free code. Managers, customers, and product owners will gain deeper insight into vital processes. By moving beyond the old-fashioned procedural thinking of the Industrial Revolution, and working together to embrace standards and practices that will advance software development, we can turn the legacy code crisis into a true Information Revolution.

Working Effectively with Unit Tests

Working Effectively with Unit Tests
Author: Jay Fields
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2014-12-09
Genre:
ISBN: 9781503242708

This book details Jay Fields' strong opinions on the best way to test, while acknowledging alternative styles and various contexts in which tests are written. Whether you prefer Jay Fields' style or not, this book will help you write better Unit Tests. From the Preface: Over a dozen years ago I read Refactoring for the first time; it immediately became my bible. While Refactoring isn't about testing, it explicitly states: If you want to refactor, the essential precondition is having solid tests. At that time, if Refactoring deemed it necessary, I unquestionably complied. That was the beginning of my quest to create productive unit tests. Throughout the 12+ years that followed reading Refactoring I made many mistakes, learned countless lessons, and developed a set of guidelines that I believe make unit testing a productive use of programmer time. This book provides a single place to examine those mistakes, pass on the lessons learned, and provide direction for those that want to test in a way that I've found to be the most productive. The book does touch on some theory and definition, but the main purpose is to show you how to take tests that are causing you pain and turn them into tests that you're happy to work with.