19 - Acceptance Testing Legacy Code

Legacy code is everywhere and we cannot escape it. Today I'm going to talk about making legacy code acceptable from a developers perspective. When taking over a legacy project or adding features to an existing application it is important to be aware of the current levels of stability. I do this through a series of acceptance and smoke tests that I can run automatically when the software changes. This gives me a level of confidence that my changes work and don't break the existing code base.