Last Saturday, we’ve had a Legacy Code Retreat. As usual, ABB was kind enough to provide us with the rooms (it’s kind of a tradition to have retreats there now). Anyway, the event was a bit different from a traditional Code Retreat – this time, we were not trying to implement Conway’s Game of Life. We battled with code, written by somebody before about which we didn’t know too much. The event was fun, and from my point of view it was the smoothest CR we’ve done – the biggest change was most probably that there were 6 people available to help and look after (4x) others (official term is facilitators, but I don’t like it). Before, when we were trying to work in just 3 people, it was much harder – for us to code at least a bit, for us to be able to spend an adequate amount of time at what everybody was doing.
As for the activities, we spent the first session getting the general hang of the problem and trying to prepare a Golden Master for further testing. It was particularly useful to actually have met a week before and write the Golden Master in many of the available languages – it turned out that our initial impressions about what performs how during 10000 iterations were sometimes off by an order of magnitude. Or two.
The best session there was (maybe because I managed to code) was “quick refactorings” – finish refactor within 2 minutes or
git checkout -- .
Went surprisingly well, we only reverted our changes once and managed to do quite a lot.
What turned out to be the two, most problematic things?
1) Network access. You need it to share code among people.
2) Many people do not know git.
And since a picture..
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| Legacy Code Retreat |
