All of us will encounter legacy code, and most of us will ‘inherit’ code to maintain. Even on the freshest of projects 99 % of the time you will encounter some ‘baggage’ code that we will have to maintain. This is especially true as a contractor for any PHP project. Deservedly or not, PHP has a bad reputation for code quality

The good news is that you can mitigate some of the worst aspects of a legacy project by doing some work up front. Making sure you have all the assets you need up front can prevent embarrassing emails to the client asking for random things and generally making your life easier.

For this first of three blog posts about legacy code, we’ll spit this into two lists: Things you need and nice to haves.

Things you need:

Server Access 

This should be a no brainer. You need access to the server to make sure you have the most up to date code, and hopefully you will be deploying some updates in the near future. Yes, this may seem very obvious but you would be surprised how easy it is to forget this step in the excitement of a new project.

Ask the client how they access and how the previous team accessed the server. Make sure you try and actually login with these credentials as well. After you successfully get access, you may need to deactivate or in the minimum change some passwords of the previous server users.

Code in Version Control

You will also want access to the most up to date version of the codebase, hopefully in a form of version control. Again, while this seems like a no-brainer, it is very important to track changes you make once you start to dig into the code. It can also provide some information as to what the previous developer was thinking with the code in the past.

Once you have access to this you can convert it to your VCS of choice or continue to use the one provided. You will really want to consider keeping the VCS the same if you are working with other existing teams or with the client who needs access to the code.

It is also worth your time to ensure that the code in the VCS is sync’d and up to date with what is on the production server. There are many file comparison tools that can be used to compare entire directories which we will cover in our next post. While you can assume a previous team who had a code base in version control has kept things up to date… like the Russians say: Trust, but verify.

Documentation

Ask for any documentation the client can provide, good or bad. Something is better than nothing.

You should also plan on converting this into some form of living document you can edit and share easily. A self hosted wiki works great for tracking changes, but so does a markdown file stored in the repo itself. Anything easy to edit will remove another barrier that will prevent you from updating documentation, and already loathsome task.

You should be documenting everything as you explore the project. Document the file and database structure, document the existing workflows. Ask the client how things “should work” and then note how things are broken. Get it all into a living document so you can track your progress.

Nice to Haves:

A Shared Project Management System

Create a method in which you can communicate your project status with the customer. This will also provide a great resource in which you and the client can document bugs and future updates.

A shared system will allow you to manage your project beyond instant messages and emails. It also provides instant feedback to the client allowing them to see ‘exactly what they are paying you for’ and allows for the easier exchange of ideas.

If you’re lucky, the client may already have one (and be trained on how to use it.) It’s also very likely the client does not know how or what a Project Management System is, in which case priority number one is showing them how it is useful.

A separate Staging and local development environment

Tools like Docker and Vagrant allow you to spin up servers quickly and provide tools to re-recreate the server after you mess it up. This will become very important as you dig in and mess things up while trying to determine exactly what is wrong.

Our next post will focus on some frameworks and tools we commonly use to evaluate legacy code. We’ll also provide some basic examples of how to use these tools.