Clean Code and Legacy Code

[Joshua Smith]

Martin-

In my place of work we have some green fields code, but a lot of it is inherited. Does your Clean Code book describe how to handle legacy code or does it assume you're architecting from the ground up?

Thanks,
Joshua Smith

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Joshua,
The case studies do show well designed "legacy" code being refactored. For the "mess" that we tend to inherit, I recommend "Working Effectively With Legacy Code."

[Katrina Owen]

It doesn't focus on legacy code, but it will give you a lot of great starting points in cleaning up inherited messes.

The problem with cleaning up inherited messes, of course, is that they usually don't have automated tests.

I'd second the suggestion to look at Working Effectively With Legacy Code

[Joshua Smith]

Thank you. I'll look into that book.

Joshua Smith

[Robert Martin]

Originally posted by Joshua Smith:
Martin-

In my place of work we have some green fields code, but a lot of it is inherited. Does your Clean Code book describe how to handle legacy code or does it assume you're architecting from the ground up?

Thanks,
Joshua Smith

Neither. It's simply a guide for transforming ugly code into clean code. The book has several examples, some small, and one reasonably large, of that kind of transformation. The book also sets for a set of traits that clean code has.