Working effectively with legacy code
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 own 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. 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.
Stats for nerds
186recommend
315mentions
234people
2008–2026years
76% recommend24% neutral1% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- "seam" dates back to refactoring & software engineering literature that pre-date LLM use by 20 years -- see Working Effectively With Legacy Code for one example (https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/working-effectively-wit...). Its a great book, still use techniques from it everyday.
"load-bearing" I have never heard used for programming before Opus, and its incredibly annoying and over-used.
- My recommendation: you should probably start from _Working Effectively with Legacy Code_ by Michael Feathers.
The best "let's do something not trivial" TDD book is probably still _Growing Object Oriented Software, Guided by Tests_ by Steve Freeman and Nat Pryce.
Most of the "more than the basics" topics are the same kinds of practices that were considered "good design" whether you were using TDD or not. For example, Parnas 1971, Berard 1993, John Carmack 1998 ("Time is an input...."), and so on.
If you are interested in more than the basics on TDD, the right starting point is _Test Driven Development by Example_ by Kent Beck, which while a bit thin on examples actually covers a nice variety of more advanced topics (although not in great depth). If you are going this route, you should pair that with Beck's 2023 essay "Canon TDD".
- > Once you reach this stage, the only escape is to first cover everything with tests and then meticulously fix bugs
The exact same approach is recommended in the book "Working effectively with legacy code" by Michael Feathers, with several techniques on how to do it. He describes legacy code as 'code with no tests'.
- I recommend reading a classic, "Working Effectively With Legacy Code" from Michael Feathers.
- I believe this is called Microsoft Driven Development
(seriously though, this book has answers for you: Working Effectively with Legacy Code, by Michael Feathers)
- I highly recommend the book "Working Effectively with Legacy Code" (Michael Feathers).
It is the best step by step guide I have ever seen to successfully work with legacy code.
Written by somebody who has been there done that many many times.
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