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Questions tagged [legacy]

Questions about legacy languages, code, or applications.

117 questions
209
votes
4 answers

What is an Anti-Corruption layer, and how is it used?

I'm trying to figure out what the Anti-Corruption layer really means. I know that it's a way to transition/work around legacy code or bad APIs. What I don't understand is how it works and what makes it a clean separation from the undesirable…
knownasilya
  • 3,284
152
votes
5 answers

What are the key points of Working Effectively with Legacy Code?

I've seen the book Working Effectively with Legacy Code recommended a few times. What are the key points of this book? Is there much more to dealing with legacy code than adding unit/integration tests and then refactoring?
Armand
  • 6,528
70
votes
11 answers

Best Practices for Handing over Legacy Code

In a couple of months a colleague will be moving on to a new project and I will be inheriting one of his projects. To prepare, I have already ordered Michael Feathers' Working Effectively with Legacy Code. But this books as well as most questions on…
PersonalNexus
  • 3,029
64
votes
10 answers

When is code "legacy"?

We've all done it, we've labelled some code (often stuff we've inherited) as "legacy"? But it's still used in the production systems - so is it really legacy? And what makes it legacy? Should we shy away from this unwarranted labelling of perfectly…
Nim
  • 1,353
61
votes
14 answers

Forbidding or controlling "Hidden IT..." Who should write and maintain ad-hoc software applications?

Bigger companies usually have the problem, that it is not possible to write all programs employees want (to save time and to optimize processes) due to a lack of staff and money. Then hidden programs will be created by some people having (at least…
matcauthon
  • 1,261
51
votes
5 answers

Does dedicated maintenance work hamper a programmer's career?

The majority of my work over the last three years has largely been around maintaining legacy systems that needed patching up or the occasional revamp before being sold again. I understand the critical role dedicated maintenance programmers have to…
Gyurme
  • 450
28
votes
5 answers

What issues lead people to use Japanese-specific encodings rather than Unicode?

At work I come across a lot of Japanese text files in Shift-JIS and other encodings. It causes many mojibake (unreadable character) problems for all computer users. Unicode was intended to solve this sort of problem by defining a single character…
Nicolas Raoul
  • 1,072
27
votes
8 answers

What are the advantages to developing with outdated technologies?

A little background: I am working at a large company, using Windows XP and coding Winforms in VB6/VB.Net and some WebForms in VB.Net (95% maintenance code). I have one 4:3 19" screen. A more modern version of Windows isn't happening soon, neither is…
prisoner24601
  • 387
23
votes
4 answers

Best practices for retrofitting legacy code with automated tests

I'm about to take on the task of reimplementing an already defined interface (a set of C++ header files) in a relatively large and old code base. Before doing this, I would like to have as complete test coverage as possible, so I can detect…
tjansson
  • 331
23
votes
3 answers

Is Poor Man's Dependency Injection a good way to introduce testability to a legacy application?

In the past year, I created a new system using Dependency Injection and an IOC container. This taught me a lot about DI! However, even after learning the concepts and proper patterns, I consider it a challenge to decouple code and introduce an IOC…
Airn5475
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23
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7 answers

Does adding unit tests make sense for well-known legacy code?

I'm talking about unit tests in the TDD sense. (Not automated "integration", or what you like to call it tests.) Legacy code as in: (C++) code without tests. (see: Michael Feathers' Working Effectively with Legacy Code) But also legacy code as in:…
Martin Ba
  • 7,862
23
votes
7 answers

How can a large, Fortran-based number crunching codebase be modernized?

A friend in academia asked me for advice (I'm a C# business application developer). He has a legacy codebase which he wrote in Fortran in the medical imaging field. It does a huge amount of number crunching using vectors. He uses a cluster (30ish…
Dave Mateer
  • 433
22
votes
5 answers

How-to convince company to start documenting for legacy software

It has been less than a year since I joined my current company. Their majority of sales have come from a single product that has been alive since the last 10 years. However, there is minimal (if at all) documentation. Not only do the developers in…
arin
  • 430
18
votes
5 answers

is Ada really gone?

Do people still use Ada -- (it was mostly used in the Defense Department) Are all applications written in Ada "Legacy"? Does Ada knowledge still sell
treecoder
  • 9,495
18
votes
6 answers

Is there any hope for writing good code atop a horribly designed database?

Here's my predicament. One of several programs I've recently inherited is built with a horrible database on the backend. The esteemed creators of it apparently did not appreciate relational concepts. A table for each and every client, named as a…
John Straka
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