Live Refactoring Session, or: How To Tame Legacy Code

So the boss comes over to me and says "Hey, we have a great new market opportunity! All we need to do is put a new GUI around our old console game and we're poised to make millions! We may also need to enable it for mobile applications by putting a REST API around the game so we can sell it to casual gamers. Since we've already written the game logic, this should be easy, right? I mean, it's just slapping a new user interface around what we've already got."

This month Richard Thomson will lead us through a live refactoring of some "legacy code" (code with no unit tests). This legacy console game has the user interface intermingled with the game logic. So we'll need to tease apart the game logic from the user interface. Also, we don't have any tests, so it's going to be a little dangerous since we won't know if we're making mistakes along the way.

We'll do this with the help of ReSharper for C++ (R++ for short) in Visual Studio. (Linux and Mac users can have a similar experience through CLion.) R++ will help us with some automated refactoring steps, reducing the chances that we'll make a fat finger mistake.

Our refactoring goals are:

• Separate game logic from user interface logic
• Enable unit testing of the game logic
• Enable new UI strategies (GUI, REST API) around the game logic

This will be an online event. Food and beverages will be provided by you :)