In this book, Michael Feathers offers start-to-finish strategies for working more effectively with large, untested legacy code bases. This book draws on material Michael created for his own renowned Object Mentor seminars: techniques Michael has used in mentoring to help hundreds of developers, technical managers, and testers bring their legacy systems under control.This book also includes a catalog of twenty-four dependency-breaking techniques that help you work with program elements in isolation and make safer changes.
Feathers (Object Mentor) presents his approach to making sense out of legacy code, and describes techniques for getting it under test, refactoring it, and adding features. He discusses instantiating a class in a test harness, adding behavior to existing classes, reasoning forward about effects, controlling the size of classes, and several dependency-breaking techniques. The short code examples are written in Java, C++, and C. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)