Re-Engineering Legacy Software

Chris Birchall

ISBN: 9789386052896

232 pages

Description

This book is ambitious in scope, setting itself the aim of teaching you everything you need to do in order to transform a neglected legacy codebase into a maintainable, well-functioning piece of software that can provide value to your organization. Covering absolutely everything in a single book is, of course, an unachievable goal, but Author has attempted to do so by approaching the problem of legacy software from a number of different angles. The book covers a wide range of technologies and tools, including Jenkins, FindBugs, PMD, Kibana, Gradle, Vagrant, Ansible, and Fabric.

About the Author

Chris Birchall is a senior developer at the Guardian in London, working on the backend services that power the website. Previously he has worked on a wide range of projects including Japan’s largest medical portal site, high-performance log management software, natural language analysis tools, and numerous mobile sites. He earned a degree in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge.

Table of Contents

Book Review

Part 1: Getting Started

Understanding the challenges of legacy projects
Finding your starting point

Part 2: Refactoring to Improve The Codebase

Preparing to refactor
Refactoring
Re-architecting
The Big Rewrite

Part 3: Beyond Refactoring—Improving Project Workflow and Infrastructure

Automating the development environment
Extending automation to test, staging, and production environments
Modernizing the development, building, and deployment of legacy software
Stop writing legacy code!