Refactoring Superpowers: make your C++ IDE do your work, faster and more safely
Clare Macrae
You've got to make a change, and the tests are passing, but you're struggling to get the code to do what you need.
You think you can see a way... Maybe the code won't compile for half an hour whilst you bend it to your will... And maybe your code reviewers won't complain about the size of the change, taking them hours to review? And if you're lucky and concentrate very hard, it will be OK. Won't it?
As Kent Beck says, "Make the change easy (warning: this may be hard), then make the easy change."
This talk will show you techniques to be kind to yourself - and your team - by making seemingly complex edits in small, safe steps, with your IDE doing much of the heavy lifting.
You'll be less tired at the end, and confident that the behaviour is unchanged. And users get the feature sooner - win, win!
Clare Macrae
Clare is an independent consultant, helping teams work sustainably and efficiently to test and refactor legacy and hard-to-test code.
She has worked in software development for over 30 years, and in C++ and Qt for 20 years, and is now branching out to other languages.
Since 2017, Clare has used her spare time to work remotely with Llewellyn Falco on ApprovalTests.cpp, to radically simplify testing of legacy code. She has enjoyed this so much that in 2019 she set up Clare Macrae Consulting Ltd, to focus even more on helping others work with legacy code.
Before this, Clare was a Principal Scientific Software Engineer at Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre. She is the original author of their popular C++ and Qt-based 3D crystal structure visualisation program Mercury.
