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Questions tagged [legacy]

Questions about legacy languages, code, or applications.

116 questions
196
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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
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151
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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
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70
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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
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64
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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
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61
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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
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52
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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
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28
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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
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28
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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
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23
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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
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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
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22
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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
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22
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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
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21
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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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18
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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
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18
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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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