An ensembling approach to making legacy code habitable

Abstract

It’s the beginning of a new quarter and your team has just inherited ownership of an existing product. However, knowledge of the system is spread around, or has been lost: most of your colleagues have never written a PHPUnit test before, or even worked in this programming language.

How do you go from not knowing how to approach a task to being confident about making new deployments? From being a knowledge silo to being able to set the the team loose to work on a new feature? Learn from the case study of a gelled team facing a new challenge by working together on the same thing, at the same time, in the same space, and at the same computer: ensemble programming.