Rescuing legacy software from impending doom (Refactoring from the trenches)

With Martin Cronje and Jacques de Vos

Dealing with an ageing code base is one of the hardest challenges that software development teams face. Legacy code bases can slow teams to a crawl, and therefore it is critical to solve this on the road to agility. Software rewrites fail at alarming rates! Refactoring - a safer approach - has emerged as the de-facto technique to tackle this challenge.

In this interactive session we will equip attendees with techniques and lessons to help them refactor more effectively. We will share our experience gained while working with various software teams, from start-ups to mid-sized, that attempted to rescue their legacy from impending doom. Learning Outcomes:
• Effectively justify the investment in refactoring legacy code to Product Owners.
• When and how to apply different refactoring workflows on legacy code.
• Practical tips to avoid common pitfalls when refactoring code.

Speaker Bio:
Martin and Jacques are passionate Software Developers and Coaches, each with more than a decade of professional experience. They spend most of our time coaching, mentoring and training software teams to help them master their craft. When not coaching they spend their time building software products. Martin is a speaker at Agile2015 (USA) and also frequently speaks at the largest African conferences incl. Agile Africa, Scrum Gathering, MS TechEd, JSinSA, RubyFuza, CodeLab and Tech4Africa. He usually speaks on topics including agile, analysis and design, TDD, refactoring, legacy code, JavaScript, Obj-C, and C#

Jacques de Vos has spoken at numerous development community events and conferences in South Africa including Developer UG, RubyFuza, SUGSA Meet-up, StartupWeekend, Coderetreat and JSinSA. He was also accepted as a speaker at the upcoming Agile2015 in Washington DC. His topics focus mostly on software engineering and management practices.