Hi all,
I was recently brought onto a Rails 2.2.3 project which was
itself an emergency rescue of a spaghetti-coded PHP project (complete with
hard-coded SQL statements!). Due to the fact that the code was already in
production and has required fairly constant maintenance and feature
additions, the dev who switched everything over to Rails hasn't written a
single test. The eventual goal, the achievement of which is one of my
primary responsibilities on the project, is to have the project be migrated
to Rails 3, fully spec'd at all levels and documented at the top level with
Cucumber features, matching Rails conventions (e.g. the database table for
the Shop model is currently 'shops_master' and will eventually be 'shops')
and with all vestiges of the original project completely removed (there's
still some PHP code running on the production site). My question is: what's
the best approach to get from here to there? Is it possible to do this
gradually while development continues on the current project, or is a total
refresh going to be necessary? I'd much prefer a gradual approach because
the other dev on the project is working full-time on adding features to and
maintaining the current site and all of my responsibilities outside of the
migration will be focused on adding features to the current site, so if I
were to do a complete refresh any work from here on out would be completely
duplicated. Additionally, the other dev on the project (who has much more
general coding experience than I do) won't be able to spare time to help me
out with problems on a refresh the way he would if any gradual changes were
implemented on the current project. The only problem with the gradual
approach is that I have no idea how to actually do it! Do I start with
unit-tests of the already-existing code and work my way out to features, or
do I start with features describing things already implemented and work my
way in? Do I try to convince the other dev to start outside-in with all new
features now, or do I wait until I've done more with what's already there?
Are there any good resources out there for tasks like this? Also, if a
refresh IS necessary: what's the best way to go about replicating the
functionality of an existing project?
tl;dr: Is it possible to save a
test-free project via gradual steps, or is a complete refresh necessary? If
the former, how do I go about doing that? If the latter, how do I do it in
a way that keeps overall functionality of the resulting project the same as
the original?
Cheers,
Shea Levy
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