What is a Legacy?
Explore the challenges and strategies for testing legacy Rails codebases. Understand what makes code legacy, why it is often misunderstood, and learn testing goals that help describe behavior, prevent unintended changes, and isolate new functionality safely in existing applications.
Getting started with legacy code testing
We won’t always get to start from scratch.
There’s a strong possibility that we’ll need to bring our testing skills to bear on a codebase that already exists. A codebase that (gasp) may not have a complete or accurate test suite to guide us.
Not all that long ago, there were no Rails legacy projects. Now some Rails codebases are old enough to attend middle school and beyond. These codebases tend to be large, and ...