Testing Legacy Code Elliotte by Rusty Harold

You've been bitten by the testing bug, are thoroughly test infected. Excellent! You're undoubtedly producing more robust, less buggy software faster and at lower cost. Sadly, it wasn't always this way. You're saddled with a large legacy of untested code. Test first development is not an option. Nonetheless unit testing, JUnit, and test driven development can still dramatically improve your maintenance tasks. Learn strategies for retrofitting test frameworks onto existing code, and developing a test suite for code that never had one before.
Elliotte Rusty Harold
When not laboring in his secret identity of a mild-mannered software developer, Elliotte Rusty Harold lives in a secret mountaintop laboratory on a large island off the East Coast of the United States with his wife Beth and dog Thor. His open source work includes the XOM library for processing XML with Java, the Amateur Media Player, and Google Cloud Tools for Eclipse. His most recent books are Java Network Programming, 4th edition, and JavaMail API, both from O’Reilly.
[RMS-3799]

[@BangsarRia]

Recently, in a large Java codebase that had no automated tests of any kind, I found API methods that were not called from anywhere in the Git repos and the terminology in the methods did not match. I did not want to waste substantial time writing tests and refactoring this code if it wasn't used. I asked a dev team in another country and fortunately they knew that their code called these methods by composing JSon strings from DB tables into scripts that were interpreted by the MVEL interpreter and then invoked by it. So, as ERH predicts in the video, I found substantial snippets of dead code to remove, but the seemingly dead API methods were actually relied upon by an application in another country that used the framework and added extensive subclasses for local logic.

[@flamingg1]

Brilliant - no wonder Google is ahead of the rest out there with guys like Rusty around

[@InvitusCode]

I hope this Video will help me... At this moment, I am working on the nightmare legacy code project (12 years development, no documentation, no testing, few comments in code) ... This is so frustrating. Before this fucked up task, i really liked my job :( Have a good day, greetings from software hell!

[@nathantorquato9777]

so.. did it help you?

[@SylvainBrunerie]

I feel you, I’ve been in the same situation for a few years… I’m just starting to realize refactoring legacy code is a whole different skill as writing new code, and videos like this one really helped. Just today I managed to get myself out of despair working on a specific function, methodically refactoring it step by step until I felt comfortable changing its behaviour. It can actually be a great feeling! I still have a lot to learn, but I think one of the keys is to stop banging your head against the walls and slowly, methodically, bring the function to a manageable state before trying to add a feature/change behaviour.

[@roosterslab678]

I can hear and understand him at 2x also ...clear voice 👌

[@pablohernandez4305]

Thanks for this great video.

[@BaronVonTacocat]

@48:13 I came here because I was reading that book! LOLZ

[@SylvainBrunerie]

What is this browser that doesn’t remember zoom level in between pages?… Weird

[@Nemethszyszy]

Haha, exactly. I was also wondering what's this. At the same time I liked the simplicity of the slides and zooming all the time just made me realize that more.

[@siros4207]

excellent

[@TheodoreRavindranath]

Seems the video title is wrong... should be "Testing Legacy Code" by Elliotte Rusty Harold