This is based on a true story.

My day job is software archeology. I find joy in recovering and analyzing code bones and culture as well as making the skeleton walk again. A short time ago, however, I was confronted with the most horrible code base I have ever seen. This talk is about how we managed to save it and achieve bi-weekly deployments with a high level of confidence.

Five million lines of code in multiple languages (Classic ASP, .NET, VBScript, VBA, JavaScript, T-SQL, PL-SQL) in one monolith. The business logic stretched from the UI (WebForms, Scripting, SQL Queries) down to the database (Stored Procedures), there was no test coverage and an enormous amount of hidden coupling. A version control system was not used, we had no test environment, deployments required developers to copy their local compilation to production and multiple customer installations are supported by uncommenting and commenting code.

Together we will explore what to do when you inherit such a thing: how to identify hotspots, find hidden coupling, explore how connascence can help you, ways to test as well as refactor and how to achieve a regular deployment schedule.