When Making a Comprehensive Retrofit of your Code...

Posted by Cliff on Friday December 21, 2001 @10:19AM from the things-you-do-when-you-rewrite-everything dept.

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?

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Regression tests by Weasel+Boy · 2001-12-21 10:37 · Score: 2, Offtopic

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.