Conquering Large Legacy Software

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This book is no longer available for sale.

Conquering Large Legacy Software

About the Book

About the Author

Mike Long
Mike Long

Mike Long is a software consultant, currently based in Oslo, Norway.  His specialties include coaching and mentoring teams to adopt modern technical practices in hostile legacy environments.

He has over 10 years professional software engineering experience, working in a variety of cultures and business domains.  Mike considers software as a craft, and enjoys sharing the pursuit of technical excellence with fellow professionals.

Mike is active in the software community.  As founder and organizer for the Beijing Software Craftsmanship Meetup he has helped bring together passionate software craftsmen to share experience and skills.  He is also a regular speaker and workshop facilitator at international conferences in Europe and China, with focus areas on Cleaning Code, Testing Legacy C, Long Life Software, and C++ Toolchains in addition to organizing and facilitating workshops such as coding dojos and code retreats.

His previous experience working with embedded systems development in Norway and England have instilled a great passion for test driven development, code craft, and avoiding oscilloscope debugging as much as humanly possible.

Table of Contents

    • Introduction
      • Why this book?
      • About this book
      • About the author
      • Credits
  • Part One: Legacy Redux
    • Chapter 1: You can conquer large legacy software
      • What is legacy software?
      • What does conquered software look like?
      • Why measurement is essential
      • Fear is the enemy, communication is your weapon
      • Prerequisites
      • In Summary
    • Chapter 2: Is bankruptcy an option?
      • Rewrite or improve?
      • Evaluation
      • Rewrite AND improve?
      • In Summary
    • Chapter 3: Know your roots
      • Holding a legacy retrospective
      • In Summary
    • Chapter 4: Technical debt
      • Why is it difficult to address technical debt?
      • Internal and External Quality
      • Why have the distinction?
    • Chapter 5: Legacy knowledge
      • Knowledge (loss) as a function of time
      • If this is normal, why should you care?
      • How to improve knowledge in a legacy system
      • In Summary
  • Part Two: Legacy Software - Improving Quality
      • Code vs. Design vs. Architecture
    • Chapter 6: Legacy Code
      • The carrying cost of code
      • The business case
      • How much code do you have?
      • How does your code change?
      • How much code can you delete?
      • How many defects are hiding in your code?
      • In summary
    • Chapter 7: Legacy Design - Under Construction
    • Chapter 8: Legacy Architecture - Under Construction
  • Part Three: Legacy Process - Improving development efficiency
    • Chapter 9: Legacy Tools - Under construction
    • Chapter 10: Legacy Testing
      • Types of testing
      • Revisiting the testing pyramid
      • Where should I start?
      • In summary

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