But let's start from the beginning...
What is legacy code?
Legacy Code is, as the name suggests programmatically, a kind of tradition from past times: a veritable “heritage.” A look at the state of the art from a few years or even decades ago opens up when we look at lines of legacy code. The real difficulty associated with legacy code lies in continuous maintenance, sometimes poor connectivity, and glaring security gaps that can arise from an unverified takeover. Similar to a genetic mutation, it can also behave with “quasi-organically” grown lines of legacy code: they often lead to increasingly unstable processing or the successive occurrence of error messages that cannot be easily corrected, as the reasons for the occurrence of such error messages are all too often buried in a veritable jumble of makeshift adjustments.
This section concludes that lines of code are at the heart of every software. Legacy code is often the result of a lack of Clean Code-Practice.
Responsibility for and prevention of legacy code
Responsibility for the longest possible functioning of something once created is distributed among software development on different shoulders: First and foremost are the programmers who produce something with their work in the first place that could be described as a functional foundation for any type of code-driven software structure. UX/UI designers are the second group who prove to be auditing when it comes to maintaining the respective code image. You are responsible for a coherent translation structure between backend and frontend, in other words, how the respective software is ultimately used. Project managers are a third group who are interested in preventing legacy code, as they want to provide customers with a solution that works as smoothly as possible and is also secure.
LegacyCode therefore provides obstacles for various stakeholder groups and should therefore be avoided from the start of a software development project.
Legacy code provides obstacles for various stakeholder groups and should therefore be avoided from the start of a software development project.
How do you avoid legacy code?
There may be various ways of confronting legacy code or resolutely opposing it. One of the most worthwhile undertakings is probably the idea of Clean Codes Dar. This is largely based on the perception of software (development) as an iterative process that never really ends. In this sense, it is about continuous maintenance, which makes it possible to easily understand information flows so that potential errors can be easily identified and corrected. What sounds pretty simple is actually relatively complex: since it is a real mammoth task to create real clean code, many ambitions in this direction remain as well-intentioned heuristics. Another, much more conventional way of dealing with legacy code is refactoring. Refactoring involves making specific changes to the code to improve the internal structure without changing the behavior of the software externally. This means that the output and behavior of the software after refactoring should be the same as before. It is essentially an internal redesign aimed at generating the code in a cleaner and more organized way. In the end, although refactoring also contributes to the Clean Code project, it is a self-contained process, by no means an ongoing effort including associated ethics, as required by the practice of clean code.
However you decide to avoid or fix legacy code, it would be foolish to omit the issue altogether. Any software development is only as good as it manages to achieve the respective goal as effectively and efficiently as possible.
