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Michael C. Feathers

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Working Effectively with Legacy Code 1st Edition

by Michael Feathers (Author)

4.5 648 ratings

Part of: Robert C. Martin (14 books)

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This book provides programmers with the ability to cost effectively handlecommon legacy code problems without having to go through the hugelyexpensive task of rewriting all existing code. It describes a series of practicalstrategies that developers can employ to bring their existing softwareapplications under control. The author provides useful guidance about how touse these strategies when refactoring or making functional changes to codebases. One of the book's key points is that it teaches developers to write teststhat can be used to make sure they are not unintentionally changing theapplication as they optimize it. Examples are provided in Java, C++, and Csharp,and the book assumes that the reader has some knowledge of UMLnotation. Strategies using UML and code in C++ and Java primarily whilelanguage independent advice will be delivered in side bars and appendices forlanguage specific users.

From the Back Cover

Get more out of your legacy systems: more performance, functionality, reliability, and manageability

Is your code easy to change? Can you get nearly instantaneous feedback when you do change it? Do you understand it? If the answer to any of these questions is no, you have legacy code, and it is draining time and money away from your development efforts.

In this book, Michael Feathers offers start-to-finish strategies for working more effectively with large, untested legacy code bases. This book draws on material Michael created for his renowned Object Mentor seminars: techniques Michael has used in mentoring to help hundreds of developers, technical managers, and testers bring their legacy systems under control.

The topics covered include

Understanding the mechanics of software change: adding features, fixing bugs, improving design, optimizing performance
Getting legacy code into a test harness
Writing tests that protect you against introducing new problems
Techniques that can be used with any language or platform―with examples in Java, C++, C, and C#
Accurately identifying where code changes need to be made
Coping with legacy systems that aren't object-oriented
Handling applications that don't seem to have any structure

This book also includes a catalog of twenty-four dependency-breaking techniques that help you work with program elements in isolation and make safer changes.

About the Author

MICHAEL C. FEATHERS works for Object Mentor, Inc., one of the world's top providers of mentoring, skill development, knowledge transfer, and leadership services in software development. He currently provides worldwide training and mentoring in Test-Driven Development (TDD), Refactoring, OO Design, Java, C#, C++, and Extreme Programming (XP). Michael is the original author of CppUnit, a C++ port of the JUnit testing framework, and FitCpp, a C++ port of the FIT integrated-testing framework. A member of ACM and IEEE, he has chaired CodeFest at three OOPSLA conferences.

ISBN-10

0131177052
ISBN-13

978-0131177055
Edition

1st
Publication date

September 22, 2004
Part of series

Robert C. Martin
Language

English
Dimensions

7 x 1.2 x 9.25 inches
Print length

464 pages
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For those who want to increase their skills and proficiency to the level of a Master Craftsman.
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From the Publisher

Programmer holding Working with Legacy Code and a lap top

Must-Read for Every Programmer and Developer

This classic, endorsed by Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin (author of Clean Code), is on many must-read lists for programmers and developers including lists featured on Guru99, DZone, Built In, Dev Community (dev.to), and more.

"The book is important, as almost every developer at some point in career, has to work with a legacy system and it still represents the most challenging problems for many companies. The book goes deep into understanding the general process of a software change like adding features, fixing bugs, optimizing performances, etc."

—Milan Milanovic, DZone, November 2021

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Pearson; 1st edition (September 22, 2004)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 464 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0131177052
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0131177055
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.63 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7 x 1.2 x 9.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #68,641 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3 in Software Design & Engineering
- #23 in Software Testing
- #75 in Software Development (Books)

Customer Reviews:
4.5 648 ratings

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Demetrio Gutierrez Finley

In great condition! No issues

Reviewed in the United States on December 8, 2023

Verified Purchase

Came as expected no issues with the textbook

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adamzg

This book will change your life as a coder for the better.

Reviewed in the United States on May 21, 2014

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Whether taking on TDD, breaking dependencies or trying to maintain code that's lacking testing this book is a must read.

Is your code a tangled mess? Are you tired of seeing telescoping methods and methods that are 100s of lines long? Want to clean up code you didn't write and get it under test but everyone's too afraid of breaking things? Does it take you forever to write unit tests? Is it painstaking and laborious? Do you write mainly integration tests because unit testing is too hard? Do you wonder how people can write lots of unit tests, let alone unit test every method? Do you want to kick your object oriented coding skills up a notch? Then this book is for you. It can teach you how to overcome all of those obstacles and so much more.

For me the first roughly 100 pages of the book were a revelation. If you don't understand how to do TDD the problem probably isn't testing, it's probably the code you're trying to test or your perceptions about what it is that you are actually supposed to be testing. Michael Feathers does a great job identifying the mistakes and traps that so many developers experience when trying write and test good code and provides recipes for overcoming them. He adds clarity to what a unit test is and what it's supposed to do and in the process takes a deep dive into what good object oriented code looks like through the eyes of TDD. The book can completely change your perception about what is and is not possible.

In addition to turning your perceptions about testing on their head, Feathers also provides good advice on how to create loosely coupled code, how to identify and eliminate dependencies in existing code as well as strategies for reorganizing poorly structured code into better objects. This book has clearly changed the way I code and the way I think about testing for the better. It's not just about testing it's also about turning procedural code into object oriented code and bringing your object oriented thinking to the next level.

I can't say enough great things about this book. It's dearer to me than any other book in my programming collection including books about object oriented code from Bloch, Beck, Fowler and others. It wasn't until I read Working Effectively with Legacy Code that things really came together for me in the object oriented world. I got the concepts individually but failed to recognize how it all comes together. What's so great about encapsulation / getters and setter? Why is it so important to have classes and methods that do just one thing? What's so important about breaking dependencies between classes? How small is a small method? How can I ever hope to achieve open/closed? How is TDD even possible? Your mileage may vary, but if you're like me this book will change your life for the better.

22 people found this helpful

Helpful

It's ok, all should read at least once

Reviewed in the United States on December 21, 2022

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My perspective is as a mid-thirties adult male who went straight from college to a job I'm still at 11+ years later, working on a large, sprawling, legacy software suite with almost no unit test coverage. Our software is the culmination of 40+ devs and contractors who came and went over the product's 20+ year lifespan. There was never an architect. There was never much oversight, pretty much pick whatever stack you wanted to build a certain feature as long as the resulting UI was vaguely consistent. Half of our application is served by legacy Java and half is ASP .NET, and most of the time navigating the software you can't tell from the UI which codebases served your page (or what parts of your page). It is hundreds of thousands of lines of tangled legacy code which all sorts of different database access strategies and UI frameworks depending on who wanted to experiment with what at the time they were there making a new feature.

Having not known anything other than this one project for my entire career, and not having a college or professional work culture that ever pushed testing on us (until now), it was kind of eerie to read through this book and find seemingly endless examples of the issues and challenges that obstruct my normal work every single day. I feel like I understand better now why some people are adamant about testing, it would have made a huge difference in what it's like to work on this legacy project of ours today, if it had been a priority way back when.

It is also evident to me however after reading the book that testing is not like some magic bullet, either, and just sprinkling some tests around doesn't fix problems like the ones I face. The author comes off a bit over-excited about how unit tests could change your life (paraphrasing), and he is right, but you have to put in the actual work. I would describe it like getting hooked by one of those old Bowflex TV commercials and so you get the workout equipment and then realize "wow, I am going to have to do a lot of work to get the results I want", and then this book is at least trying to be your workout guide on what muscle groups you should be exercising and roughly how to do it. Pretty useful but you still have to put it all together yourself into a routine that is right for you/your team/your project, and then actually do the work, continuously. Reading this book and then not applying the advice within will get you about the same results as reading a book about workouts and exercise for a healthy body and then continuing to not exercise and eating fast food for lunch every day.

I think in my case after working in real-life examples of whats in this book for over a decade very little of it surprised me in any way, but it was helpful to see these things spelled out with their cause and effect, ideas for solutions, how to at least avoid making the problem worse, etc.

I understand now why some people we would hire as new developers to the project would get all sad and disappointed when they asked about tests and we told them we really don't have any. I literally never knew any better and wasn't convinced until I read this book.

So I would say that all devs/engineers should read this book at least once, there is value in it for sure. On the downside, prepare yourself for a difficult and dull slog. The book, for all its wisdom within, is not particularly engaging to read and the examples are just. plain. awful. Truthfully even if I had read this book 10+ years ago when I was getting started, I'm not sure the examples would have spoke to me (because they are terrible), which might have made it less convincing. But it was the case that at the time I read this I had been working and playing with live examples for a decade-plus as I said before so all the examples he described were perfectly apparent to me in my own project's code. His examples stink.

I think it would help newer developers if there was a digital copy that you could provide some parameters and get examples in only a language that is familiar to you. That and also re-write all the examples to not stink somehow. I don't know, the examples are hyper-realistic in the sense that "yeah, I have definitely seen people write garbage like this all the time," but the things he is trying to demonstrate in these examples don't have to be made more realistic by using awful naming, spacing, lack of comments, etc. Just my personal opinion.

It is a difficult book to force yourself to keep reading through, in my opinion, but you definitely should and you will most likely be glad you did.

7 people found this helpful

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Siddharth Kothari

Very helpful book

Reviewed in India on July 31, 2023

Verified Purchase

Amazing book. Must read after clean code books from uncle bob.

María d.

Great!!!

Reviewed in Mexico on November 23, 2020

Verified Purchase

Llegó en excelentes condiciones. Y muy rápido también 😁

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liouba2505

Le cadeau original pour un geek anglophone

Reviewed in France on January 9, 2022

Verified Purchase

J'avoue, je n'aurais jamais eu l'idée d'offrir ce livre s'il ne m'avait pas été demandé. C'est une véritable bible pour les encodeurs a priori. Un beau pavé de 400 pages en anglais, il y a de quoi occuper quelque temps !

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Reviewer

This book is a reprinting of very low quality - beware!

Reviewed in Australia on January 12, 2024

Verified Purchase

The book arrived with "Printed in the United States of America" in the front, and "Manufactured by Amazon.com.au in Sydney" at the back. On my copy, the cover is misprinted, and the contents of the book include printing and typesetting issues which are not present in the genuine article, such as page titles being half cut off. This book is not a genuine copy of the book, it is a locally printed book which is of severely less quality than the genuine book.

Paolo Mazzoni

Grande libro

Reviewed in Italy on September 9, 2017

Verified Purchase

Grande libro, devo ancora finire di leggerlo ma è molto utile.
Consigliatissimo a tutte le persone che sviluppano, non solo a chi lavora con codice legacy.
Lo consiglio soprattutto a chi scrive molto codice affiché non lasci in eredità ad altri altro pessimo codice legacy....

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