We have all worked with code bases that were hard to maintain. Often times, it is difficult to know where and how to start the refactoring process. Further, it is not always clear how to integrate concepts like dependency injection and unit testing into the process on our journey to cleaner, more maintainable code. In this talk, we’ll start with an existing application that that exhibits many of the common pain points you are likely to encounter when working with an existing monolithic application. In a play by play style, we’ll show how to refactor the application to fix problems like long methods, tight coupling and duplicate code. Along the way, we’ll introduce dependency injection so we can write unit tests to validate our changes and we’ll show how to use a mocking framework so we can test our code without hitting external dependencies.

When we finish this talk, you will feel more confident handling the refactoring challenges you face in your code. You will know how and where to introduce abstraction layers to break code into smaller, more manageable chunks. You will understand how to introduce unit tests into an existing code base. We will also demonstrate how dependency injection and mocking allow us to write tests that are repeatable and maintainable. Most of all, you will understand how all of these pieces work together in helping us write higher quality code