Working Effectively with Legacy Code

Recently i attended Working Effectively with Legacy Code course by Michael Feathers

It was very good learning experience , he talks about how to work with code that does not have unit test or less unit test. He shared techniques can be used to improve legacy code and get better understanding of application.

This post is to share some of them before i forget:-)
  

Sprout Method/Class

This is pretty common technique but did't know that it has name. Adding new method/class sounds much easier than changing some existing code for new feature, so we should use this approach for any new feature that we want to introduce.

This approach can be used on existing method also to make it testable.

Work of caution that you don't want over do it !

Poor Man dependency injection

Everybody knows what dependency injection is, apart from some of the benefit it can also be used to make code testable, so for unit test you can have sample/dummy implementation that can be injected to your application code to make is testable. 

One of the problem with this technique is that it will result in method signature changes and that might mean that all the code in that call stack might need to change.

Just remember that you don't have to use spring to do this!

Extract and override

This is interesting one looks like silver bullet or Brahmastra for many problem.This pattern is used to have control on dependency that are hard to fake.

Assume there is function that makes some database/socket call and then does some calculation and you want to write unit test for calculation logic.

To make function testable you can do below changes

• Extract database part of logic and put that in new function
• Make that function protected. Thanks to OOPs , finally some good usecase for protected.
• Write new class that extends original class and only override database interaction function(i.e was protected)
• Use new class for your testing and you are done!

This is very powerful technique because you don't have to go through pain of changing  constructor/method parameter, so call stack remains intact.

Since it is based on method overriding, so you need to have discipline in team to make sure that fake class is only used for testing. 

Instance delegate

Used to test static function class. Create normal function that will delegate call to static function and during test create another class that will override new function that was created to add fake call .

Singleton 

Singleton make life very difficult from testing perspective, way to make it testable is allow injection of new singleton implementation and use that implementation for testing. 

Create interface to break big class

Although adding new method/class is much simpler but still lot of code is added to existing class/method and over period of time it becomes big i mean really big.

Approach to simplify class

• Creation of interface without any method 
• Class that you want to simplify should implements new interface
• All the function that was using class should now use new interface and compiler will gives you errors about missing method and you can start moving methods to interface to fix the issue.

Main advantage for this approach is that you don't have prerequisite of unit test , you can take benefit of compiler/IDE feature. 

Method & variable dependency graph

 When class grows overtime and it does not adhere to Single responsibility principle, working out what functions goes where could be tedious.

You can draw dependency graph of variable & method to workout how things are related. This can help to come up with new classes will will adhere to single responsibility principle.

Seam

Identifying seam plays important role in working out hidden dependency. 

Definition of seam from dictionary is 

A line of junction formed by sewing together two pieces of material along their margins.

Definition in context of re-factoring is - part of code will enable testing.

for e.g functions performs some I/O operation and then some calculation, so if you want to test calculation without doing any major changes to core logic then you can "Extract & Override" approach to solve this.

Scratch Refactoring
I am sure you might have seen one big class/methods with 100s or 1000s of lines and you have to scratch your head to understand what this does.
To make things more interesting that part of code is very critical to company and you have to do some changes.
Scratch Refactoring is very useful for such type of situation

• Take monster code that you want to simplify/understand
• This type refactoring is only focused on understanding code, so it should be done in palin text editor so that you are not worried about compilation error that IDE generates.
• Break big method in small and single concern method, simplify condition , delete some unused code

Main benefit of this approach is that you don't have to commit this in Svn/Git only purpose of this work is understand as much as possible by creating small code blocks.

While you are doing this you will get better understanding and code is simplified to extent that doing real re-factoring will be not be that difficult.
 
 Conclusion

I must say it was very useful session, lot of learning and fresh perspective.
I have got copy of Working Effectively Legacy book and will read & practice it to get more better understanding.