Book Image

Agile Technical Practices Distilled

By : Pedro M. Santos, Marco Consolaro, Alessandro Di Gioia
Book Image

Agile Technical Practices Distilled

By: Pedro M. Santos, Marco Consolaro, Alessandro Di Gioia

Overview of this book

The number of popular technical practices has grown exponentially in the last few years. Learning the common fundamental software development practices can help you become a better programmer. This book uses the term Agile as a wide umbrella and covers Agile principles and practices, as well as most methodologies associated with it. You’ll begin by discovering how driver-navigator, chess clock, and other techniques used in the pair programming approach introduce discipline while writing code. You’ll then learn to safely change the design of your code using refactoring. While learning these techniques, you’ll also explore various best practices to write efficient tests. The concluding chapters of the book delve deep into the SOLID principles - the five design principles that you can use to make your software more understandable, flexible and maintainable. By the end of the book, you will have discovered new ideas for improving your software design skills, the relationship within your team, and the way your business works.
Table of Contents (31 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1
7
Section 2
13
Section 3
19
Section 4
25
Chapter 21
28
License: CyberDojo

Conclusions

It takes time to become proficient in writing tests for legacy code and we understand that sometimes it is a daunting task. In this lesson, we distilled what in our opinion are the most important concepts on legacy code testing. Spending some time practicing the techniques we have outlined is an extremely useful exercise and we hope that it might give you some ideas helping to make that work a bit less daunting.

Guideline Questions

Is it important to understand the legacy code in detail?

If the answer is yes, characterization tests are probably the best solution. This is a slow process but gives us the best insight on how legacy code works.

Can we get by with a superficial understanding of the legacy code?

If the answer is yes and the system under test has clear inputs and outputs, we can probably use the Golden Master technique or Approval Tests.

We added a few web resources and books that go much deeper into this subject.