Working Effectively with Legacy Code

Michael Feathers offers a practical guide for developers tasked with maintaining and extending codebases that lack tests, documentation, or clear structure. Rather than advocating for a complete rewrite, the book focuses on techniques to make legacy code safe to change, such as characterizing existing behavior, isolating dependencies, and incrementally refactoring. The text is direct and instructional, prioritizing actionable strategies over theoretical purity, and serves as a companion to broader software design principles by addressing the messy reality of production systems.

Description adapted from Open Library bibliographic data ↗.