8.3 Themes
We’ll work through an example of incrementally improving a legacy codebase. You’ll learn a handful of specific techniques, each tailored to the specific legacy challenge at hand. The approaches you’ll learn are a subset of at least a couple dozen such techniques found in Working Effectively with Legacy Code [Fea04] and elsewhere. You’ll discover that the techniques are simple to learn and that once you’ve learned a handful, it’s pretty easy to figure out many of the rest.
Core themes for approaching legacy challenges include the following:
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Test-drive whenever you can. Test-drive code changes into either new members or even new classes when possible.
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Don’t decrease the test coverage. It’s very easy to introduce a small amount of code ...
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