Overview
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Learn how to embrace a legacy system and improve it while paying down technical debt.
Syllabus
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Introduction
- Embrace the legacy and tackle the debt
- What you should know
- Definitions
- Familiarize yourself
- Remember the prime directive
- Take ownership
- Set up a dev environment
- Skim the code
- Technical debt grows without tests
- Create a test suite (if one is missing)
- Run the test suite
- Handle failing tests
- Build out test coverage
- Build dependency behavior tests
- Aging tools make technical debt worse
- Introduce dependency management
- Update dependencies and tools
- Remove noise and distractions
- Read by refactoring
- Isolate external services and devices
- Code like a scientist
- Technical debt will grow like weeds
- Stay test driven
- Practice refactoring
- Keep code clean
- Monitor code quality
- Next steps
