Techniques for the worst of legacy code: Peel and Slice

The system crashes in a portion of the codebase you have never seen. It is Friday night, 4 o'clock pm, and you have to fix it before you can go home. How can you accelerate your understanding of the bug and still get out of the office before 5?

Learn to use two simple techniques to isolate the problem by dividing and conquering code without necessarily understanding it. Once the problem has been isolated you will have a suite of tests that replicate the error, and allows you to simply debug to find the problem. After the problem is found, and you have tests replicating the error, you will have everything you need to fix it.

About Llewellyn Falco

Llewellyn Falco is an independent agile coach. He discovered strong-style pair programming. He is creator of the open source testing tool ApprovalTests( www.approvaltests.com ). He spends most of his time programming in Java and C# specializing in improving legacy code.He is the co-founder of TeachingKidsProgramming.org & co-author of Mob Programming Guidebook

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