PSA: Working Effectively With Legacy Code by Michael Feathers

[pozorvlak]

I am only about a hundred pages into this book, but it had paid for itself after fifty. I wish I'd read it ten years ago. Actually, I wish I'd read it nineteen years ago when I started my first programming job, but it hadn't been written then. Techies, if you haven't read it, I strongly advise you to do so at your earliest convenience. It's about how to deal with a Catch-22 that's come up over and over again in my programming career:

• I can't safely modify, or even understand, this code, because it has no tests.
• I can't test it without modifying it.

Feathers describes techniques for bringing code under test with the minimal amount of disruption, then refactoring it towards maintainability. Some of the advice I'd worked out for myself, but having names and a structure to hang ad-hoc insights on is great. The book concentrates on object-oriented and procedural languages, but a lot of the techniques should generalise to other paradigms.

Check out this book on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44919.Working_Effectively_with_Legacy_Code