Strategies for dealing with legacy code

Legacy code is everywhere. Unless you've been working only with greenfield projects, you've probably have had to support code written by someone else. Lack of tests, code smells, poor domain modelling all reduce the development speed to a crawl. Your choices are either to rewrite or to refactor.

Rewriting the entire codebase sometimes isn't an option, so how do you conquer this space and deliver faster with confidence?

Takeaways:
In this talk, we will talk about various techniques with which you can understand and explore a poorly understood codebase and ways of taking changes in such projects live.

Who should attend:
Any developers who have been exposed to bad code or are working on legacy codebases i.e. codebases which have not aged well and are hard for new comers to understand and contribute to.

Who's the speaker:
Anay has had the opportunity to work with multiple startups where the codebase grew quite rapidly without the focus on quality. We employed a variety of techniques such as approval tests, replaying production traffic, ratcheting and more to ensure that we gained additional confidence with every change.

General instructions:

• Doors open at 6:30 PM and (free, vegetarian) snacks will be served. If you have dietary restrictions, please talk to the organizers (Karun/KC) so they can attempt to accommodate you.
• Talk starts at 7:00 PM sharp
• We are unable to provide video recording at this time
• This is a conference style talk with questions towards the end. No laptop/prior prep is required.