Continuous Delivery for Legacy Code - Richard Groß - NDC London 2024

This talk was recorded at NDC London in London, England. #ndclondon #ndcconferences #developer #softwaredeveloper
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This is based on a true story.
My day job is software archeology. I find joy in recovering and analyzing code bones and culture as well as making the skeleton walk again. A short time ago, however, I was confronted with the most horrible code base I have ever seen. This talk is about how we managed to save it and achieve bi-weekly deployments with a high level of confidence.
Five million lines of code in multiple languages (Classic ASP, .NET, VBScript, VBA, JavaScript, T-SQL, PL-SQL) in one monolith. The business logic stretched from the UI (WebForms, Scripting, SQL Queries) down to the database (Stored Procedures), there was no test coverage and an enormous amount of hidden coupling. A version control system was not used, we had no test environment, deployments required developers to copy their local compilation to production and multiple customer installations are supported by uncommenting and commenting code.
Together we will explore what to do when you inherit such a thing: how to identify hotspots, find hidden coupling, explore how connascence can help you, ways to test as well as refactor and how to achieve a regular deployment schedule.

[@AK-vx4dy]

One warning about feature flaging probably unused code, in some businesses exists things that are done weekly, monthly, quaterly or yearly (or randomly rare), so it is important to catch such things with responsible persons. Second, especially when logic is spread in SQL, UI etc.. some times skipping such code may give catastrophic results or worse give a results looking "normal" but without some specific information wich is needed for accounting or tax etc. for a month before it will be catched.

[@mkellock1976]

This was a great talk, too bad the croud was a bit shy. As someone who is often bought into projects that are exactly in this state, it's great to hear we're on the right track. Culture is probably the hardest part it fix, management really needs to buy into wanting a continuous improvement culture, especially when the code starts to stabailse. Engineers need to speak up too, which is often very difficult to do if disenfranchised.