Avoiding Legacy Code with Michael Feathers

About this Episode

Avoiding Legacy Code with Michael Feathers

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Guest

Michael Feathers: Author of Working Effectively with Legacy Code; r7krecon.com

Summary

What makes a code base go bad and become "Legacy Code"? Can teams avoid writing bad code? Michael Feathers, author of Working Effectively With Legacy Code joins Tech Done Right to talk about technical debt, how communication can prevent bad coding practices, why coding problems are never just about code, and what it's like to go around the world seeing the worst code messes ever written.

Notes

02:36 - The Definition of “Legacy Code”

04:25 - What makes code bases go bad?

07:26 - Working as a Team to Avoid Technical Debt and Other Problems

09:49 - Tools and Techniques That Have Changed Since the Book was Written

• scythe

12:38 - Lack of Institutional Memory

15:24 - What creates technical debt?

• Scrum
• Extreme Programming

22:50 - “Symbiotic Design”

• Symbiotic Design Provocation
• Symbiotic Design Implications
• Conway’s Law

25:38 - Test-Driven Development

• Keynote - Writing Software (2014 TDD is dead from DHH)
• RailsConf 2017: Opening Keynote by David Heinemeier Hansson

31:44 - Fads in Codebases

36:58 - Error Handling in Applications (in Relation to Conway’s Law)

Episode Links

• Working Effectively With Legacy Code
• michaelfeathers/scythe: A tool for detecting barely used code in production

Episode Comments