Legacy Code Bases

Tom Hukins tom at eborcom.com
Mon Feb 6 03:55:44 PST 2006


On Sun, Feb 05, 2006 at 05:30:32PM +0000, Robbie Bow wrote:
> Talks on practicable means of developing tests for legacy code bases
> and systems within a time and resource constrained environment would
> be interesting. In fact, working with legacy systems generally seems
> to be something we all do but no-one discusses much as far as I can
> see!

Peter Scott's "Perl Medic" book contains lots of useful tips for
working with an understanding legacy code.  I strongly recommend it
for anyone managing lots of Perl code you didn't write.

For testing, "Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook" provides some
useful ideas, particularly some of the mocking techniques.

And, as if by magic, both these books have appeared in Robbie's
office!  Unfortunately, I can't perform this trick for most of you.
Nor can I make the books talk.

I've also found the Aspect module on CPAN useful for tracing method
calls, and various GraphViz modules useful for inspecting data
structures.

Tom


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