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Title: Continuous Delivery with Legacy Code
Proposer: Dan Swain
Proposer: Leon Hewitt
Type: Case-Study
Duration: 45 mins
Description:
Your team are invited to a meeting about their next exciting assignment. The company's doing so well and taking so much money, that now the banks need you audit for PCI compliance. You start looking at what's involved in changing this vast legacy codebase to comply. What you discover is a labyrinth of code with many traps and even more secrets. This is a race against time with the threat of a looming fine, a tale of how a team worked their way through a maze, whilst still processing transactions and avoiding any big bangs.
The case study will take you through how we recently took up this challenge and extracted functionality from a tightly coupled legacy code base into a secure card data environment. The refactorings were continuously deployed and the code was constantly in use. Along the way we will define what legacy code is, illustrate the challenges involved in refactoring old code bases and note how fully tested code isn't as easy to change as we were lead to believe.