Skip to Content
Working Effectively with Legacy Code
book

Working Effectively with Legacy Code

by Michael Feathers
September 2004
Intermediate to advanced
464 pages
10h
English
Pearson
Content preview from Working Effectively with Legacy Code

Chapter 6: I Don’t Have Much Time and I Have to Change It

Let’s face facts: The book you are reading right now describes additional work—work that you probably aren’t doing now and work that could make it take longer to finish some change you are about to make in your code. You might be wondering whether it’s worth doing these things right now.

The truth is, the work that you do to break dependencies and write tests for your changes is going to take some time, but in most cases, you are going to end up saving time—and a lot of frustration. When? Well, it depends on the project. In some cases, you might write tests for some code that you need to change, and it takes you two hours to do that. The change that you make afterward might take 15 minutes. ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

Clean Coder, The: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers

Clean Coder, The: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers

Robert C. Martin
Clean Code Fundamentals

Clean Code Fundamentals

Robert C. Martin

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0131177052Publisher Support