Month: March 2020

For all you guys that just want the pros and cons, check at the bottom of the post for the main out comes of my experience and findings. Continue reading if you want to read more details on said findings.

I never thought so early in my career there would be a time that I would need to inherit a codebase.

There was a bit of talk with the team and with the client about a lift and shift an existing code base and what not. I didn’t really have a problem with it cause everything was still pretty new to me.

So new codebase, go through the norm git clone <https://github.com/tony2tones/angular/someotherbsprojectthatcouldbegreatorlame.git and you npm install and so on. I navigate around and then start looking at the code base…you got to make sure that the project works before looking right?

So i navigate around and its just things i’ve never seen before, I’m checking this shit out and there is like Models within Models Referencing other models and other things i’ve seen before.

I tried to remain calm even though knowing full well that i’d need to upkeep this possibly add features to this code base so I was nervous.

I heard from the other devs that the codebase was actually pretty good, to a high ‘clean code’ standard I believe. That was quite a big deal. So the codebase was ours to hold and to manage.

These are the first few things i realised:

• Code was not unit tested(which basically become our duty to fix)
• Code was to a high standard but reading the code was difficult…there was a lot going on
• Not unit tested therefor code was not developed to be unit tested
• Lots of refactoring breaking down code and making sure it would be unit testable

So the lift and shift was a success(in the pipeline and all) but the unit tests  were incredibly difficult...it came down to whenever i got assigned a unit test on that codebase, I needed help. Everyone struggled...I was a little annoyed thinking i'm really new at this job and they are giving me things that senior devs are struggling on....don't get me wrong they did them and they're were very complex but you know a lot of effort is all i'm saying. So reading the code and understanding it for me...took quite some time weeks infact..so ya lot of time understanding things and always struggling at unit tests..I learned a bit but ya i'm far from perfect.

Thanks for reading the above journey of my experience. So my understanding and outcomes come to these things:

TLDR

Here are my main experience and findings.

The above is just my findings of inHeriting vs rewriting a codebase. Open to discussion i’ll be happy to update. This is like XP Xperience Post