Legacy Code Retreat

I had the pleasure of attending a Legacy Code Retreat at the weekend organized by the Cambridge Software Craftsmanship group. Legacy code is a subject close to my heart. I've spent most of my working life immersed in it, and I'm been at least fairly successful is altering my point of view from "OMG THE CODE IS SHIT" to "what can I learn from this?".

The event was excellently co-facilitated by Alastair Smith and Erik Talboom and followed a familiar format of short sessions with tight constraints and retrospectives to discuss.

This was my first encounter of TDD as if you meant it which was certainly a challenging experience and one that I'll definitely try again.

I enjoyed the discipline of baby steps. We set a timer for a minute and either had to write a test, or perform a refactoring (but not both) within that minute. Failing to do that would reset the code and you'd start again. The object of this exercise was to judge the smallest steps you can work in. This is really interesting experiment to do; it forces you to think of your work as a series of smaller and smaller steps.

I also learnt the term "Golden Master", refering to a record of the working system. Working with Andrea, we were tasked with writing system level tests to capture the behaviour. We quickly hit upon the idea of simply capturing the entire output of the program as the simplest end-to-end test. This proved to be amazingly powerful; armed just with an end-to-end test we felt very confident about changing the code. We understood that the seeded randomness didn't cover every case, but we figured we could just capture more runs of the program to increase the confidence. Our simple measure of the confidence we had was that commenting out or changing a line of code in the program always seemed to result in that integration test failing.

The main take away for me was just that the discipline of focusing on a single thing is incredibly powerful. Instead of "fixing all the easy things", I'm going to try and take a step back and focus on something specific (be it renaming, simplifying conditionals, or just increasing test coverage).