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by sandreas 2671 days ago
Some of my rules for a big legacy code base:

- don't plan or do a full rewrite - it'll almost never work

- learn and use tools to automate the build system and quality assurance (jenkins, sonarqube, docker, git, etc.)

- take the time to improve your skills and the skills of your team (coding dojos, experiments)

- write automated tests (unit, integration, acceptance) for existing code where ever possible - write at least unit tests and integration tests for new code

- do refactoring and first focus on cross cutting concerns (APIs, translations, caching, logging, database, etc.)

- migrate things to well tested isolated APIs (e.g. use REST / Graphql APIs with new endpoints in the frontend and try not to use untested code for these APIs)

- don't be too backwards compatible (move fast and break things)

Hope it helps ;)

1 comments

These text boxes are not great...even on my 4k monitor I have to click the scroller at the bottom to see 1/2 of your longest bullet points; must be even worse on mobile. Better to just write it in plain text instead of a box.
Thx for the hint... edit done :-)