Jeff Hart - Refactoring Legacy Code for Testability

Refactoring legacy code for testability

How dealing with brownfields can make you a better (greenfield) developer

Abstract: We all know we “should” write unit tests, and some of us try to practice Test Driven Development (TDD). But oftentimes it’s hard. Some code is really hard to test, especially if it wasn’t designed with testability in mind. And truth is, a lot of us don’t really grok what “testability” means (other than use a lot of interfaces, but how does that help?). In this session we’ll take a typical sample UWP app written without unit tests and transform it into a form that can be unit tested. Along the way we’ll see some of the principals which TDD promotes and how they would have prevented the “bad design” in the first place. Although this is a Windows Universal Platform app, those principals should apply to everything from web to WinForms and WPF in between.