September 2004
Intermediate to advanced
464 pages
10h
English
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Chapter 5: Tools
What tools do you need when you work with legacy code? You need an editor (or an IDE) and your build system, but you also need a testing framework. If there are refactoring tools for your language, they can be very helpful as well.
In this chapter, I describe some of the tools that are currently available and the role that they can play in your legacy code work.
Automated Refactoring Tools
Refactoring by hand is fine, but when you have a tool that does some refactoring for you, you have a real time saver. In the 1990s, Bill Opdyke started work on a C++ refactoring tool as part of his thesis work on refactoring. Although it never became commercially available, to my knowledge, his work inspired many other efforts in other languages. ...