Cast 2017

Do you work on a large product that’s been around for a while? Are there dark corners and scary areas that no one wants to touch? Does everything seem interconnected in ways that no one fully understands? Do you have low, spotty or maybe even unknown automated test coverage? Do your colleagues talk about doing a “big re-write” or hiring an army of contractors to add tests in fragile areas? Does it feel tempting to attribute escaped defects to something like “there was no subject matter expert for the code we changed”?

If any of this sounds familiar, well, I’m afraid I don’t have all the answers. However, my belief that there are ways to make changing legacy code safer has led me to conduct several experiments to help determine what the most effective tactics might be. Interestingly, although I am a tester, none of the investigations I have undertaken so far involved doing any actual testing. So no matter what your role is, join me to hear what I’ve learned about good and bad ways to approach risk mitigation strategies such as code stewardship, team shadowing, knowledge management, test coverage analysis and culture change.