Doctor, Don't Defenestrate: What to Do with Legacy Scripts

By Michael T Lombardi

Elevator Pitch

Everyone has production critical services that rely on legacy solutions put in place long ago to solve problems. Legacy code is valuable - and valuable investments shouldn’t be thrown away without a second thought.

Come learn how you can triage legacy code and take advantage of it iteratively.

Description

Legacy script is in every organization and belongs to every team. We’ve all got production critical services that rely on one or more solutions we put in place long ago. We wrote those solutions, unsurprisingly, to solve problems - and they did, or they wouldn’t still be in use.

That means legacy code is valuable - and valuable investments shouldn’t just be tossed out the window without a second thought. This talk will cover how you can get your legacy code under control by evaluating, documenting, and adding tests to it - and how doing so will enable you to begin to update and replace your legacy scripts safely and more quickly than before.

You’ll learn about:

  • Inline Documentation
  • Reference Documentation
  • Characterization Tests
  • Unit Tests
  • Concept Documentation
  • Source Control Practices

We’ll use an example legacy script to dissect at each stage of the process, showing how you can go about getting your legacy code under control - and how you can use these same practices on your new code to save yourself the future work.