When Making a Comprehensive Retrofit of your Code...

chizor asks: "My programming team is considering making some sweeping changes to our code base (150+ perl CGIs, over a meg of code) in the interest of consistency and reducing redundancy. We're going to have to make some hard decisions about code style. What suggestions might readers have about tackling a large-scale retrofit?" Once the decision has been made for a sweeping rewrite of a project, what can you do to make sure things go smoothly and you don't run into any development snags...especially as things progress in the development cycle?

Comments

Don't ask this here!

[Will The Real Bruce]

Slashdot is a site built around perl scripts, so one might expect there to be a considerable amount of knowledge and interest about a topic such as this.

Could you, dear writer, perhaps be the maintainer of a GIANT collection of perl scripts badly in need of a rewrite?

Are you the maintainer of Slash??

Regression tests

[Weasel Boy]

Make sure you have a suite of tests that produce known output for your old code, so that you can ensure that the new code works in exactly the same way. Don't add anything new until you are proven conformant with what you had before.