Understand Legacy Code

The Mikado Method helps you tackle big changes safely.

Steven Diamante gave a great presentation on Legacy Code at the Seattle Crafter meetup.

Maude Lemaire wrote a great book rooted from her experience in the trenches, at Slack.

This book is a catalog of the bread-and-butter moves that can improve your coding game.

Let's rewrite the whole thing on a modern stack!

How to best learn out of refactoring exercises, depending on your level of experience.

A look into Catherine Hicks' white paper "It’s Like Coding in the Dark: The need for learning cultures within coding teams" (Catharsis Consulting).

Does your codebase feel like a tote bag of "shared" and "utils" folder?

Dead code adds noise to the codebase and should be deleted.

Can assistants like ChatGPT refactor existing code without introducing bugs?

People are using tools like ChatGPT to write tests on existing code… But how reliable is this?

A pragmatic way for you to start automating deployments of a Legacy system.

You need to change code that's not tested.

You need to change code that's not tested.

You need to change code that's not tested.

My recap of the most common and useful advice one can give to tackle Legacy codebases.

Watch Gregor Riegler refactor code with this coding exercise.

I have hosted more than 37 speakers to talk about Legacy Code tips and tricks.

This book analyses how your brain works and gives concrete advice to help you work with Legacy Code.

4 great talks on Legacy Code that I had the pleasure to host.

I experimented with tools that can generate tests for you, leveraging AI.

Some thoughts about refactoring and the opposite operation: defactoring.

A reflection on coaching, facts, and pragmatism.

5 great talks on Legacy Code that I had the pleasure to host.

How do you refactor a complex legacy application when you can't rely on automation tools?

4 great talks on Legacy Code that I had the pleasure to host.

Consistency is great!

You may have heard one or the others.

My recipe for recovering from outdated dependencies and keeping healthy habits

5 great talks on Legacy Code that I had the pleasure to host.

It seems necessary to start adding tests on this code… but what if it makes things worse?

When work looks trivial from the outside, but you know it will actually take much longer to do.

Even drawing them by hand can help you make sense of a tangled codebase!

Here's an interesting book on approaching Legacy Software.

Working on Legacy systems can be extremely beneficial to your career… If you can explain why it matters to the business!

5 great talks on Legacy Code that I had the pleasure to host.

This book is filled with practical strategies to apply on Legacy systems.

Should you plan time for refactoring during Sprints?

A technique you can resort to when you need to make risky changes.

Should you write E2E tests to cover more cases faster?

5 advice you can try when you feel paralyzed with a change that's too risky to merge, but too long to verify.

This book is full of tips to get into an unfamiliar codebase.

5 great talks on Legacy Code that I had the pleasure to host.

A personal story to illustrate how good habits can save your day when things turn bad.

Practice working with code you've never seen before helps make it easier.

What you should be looking for to build a great and useful documentation.

Building the habit of small refactorings as you go will make a difference in the long run.

Learn to draw a Knowledge Map of your codebase within minutes, and find out who owns what!

Here's a technique that leverages how your brain works to make any code easier to work with.

This book is a gold mine.