Living With Legacy Code by Rowan Merewood

Rowan Merewood uploaded slides from his PHP Benelux ‘10 Presentation “Living With Legacy Code”.

Legacy code is a hard to handle topic, that’s why normally we as developers would like to walk around that. Interestingly Rowan Merewood propses the following toolchain in his presentation (inkl. a usage cheatsheet per programm):

• PHPDOC – http://www.phpdoc.org/
• Doxygen – http://www.stack.nl/~dim…
• Ctags – http://ctags.sourceforge.net/
• BOUML – http://bouml.free.fr/
• Codesniffer – http://pear.php.net/pack…
• Continous Integration
  • PHPUnder Control – http://www.phpundercontrol.org/
  • Hudson-CI – http://hudson-ci.org/

Just heard a great presentation by Rowan Merewood (@rowan_m) about legacy code. After this I think there are 2 things we should remember:

• Split it up: don’t try to do in all the same thing. Splitting it up in smaller parts will make you able to set goals and make sure you are not loosing a lot of time.
• Make it better, not the best: in some cases of rewriting legacy code its better to wrap better code around it.

(Review by a visitor, Source)

A stream of feedback to the presentation is available on Joind.

Next to that his presentation offer some soft-skills and naturally the testing topic.