In this chapter, we will discuss the following topics:
Reading a Django code base
Discovering relevant documentation
Incremental changes versus full rewrites
Writing tests before changing code
Legacy database integration
It sounds exciting when you are asked to join a project. Powerful new tools and cutting-edge technologies might await you. However, quite often, you are asked to work with an existing, possibly ancient, codebase.
To be fair, Django has not been around for that long. However, projects written for older versions of Django are sufficiently different to cause concern. Sometimes, having the entire source code and documentation might not be enough.
If you are asked to recreate the environment, then you might need to fumble with the OS configuration, database settings, and running services locally or on the network. There are so many pieces to this puzzle that you might wonder how and where to start.
Understanding the Django version used in the code is...