Coding Katas for practicing the refactoring of legacy code

Question

I\'ve gotten quite interested in coding katas in recent months. I believe they are a great way to hone my programming skills and improve the quality of the code I write on the j

Answer 1

I feel like necromancer replying to such an old thread, but there is one thing that would make for a worthy addition - Legacy Code Retreat.

Idea is to have a Code Retreat with legacy code and try to practice the very techniques for dealing with such, but I can't see anything that would ban you from simply using the code prepared and practicing with it by yourself. Just using it for creating a Golden Master makes for an hour of work, and there's a lot more you can do. If your kata usually last around 2 hours, I'd say just by splitting what usually happens on LCR into kata gives you four different things to work on.

There's a GitHub repository by idea's author, J.B. Rainsberger, that contains a simple legacy system that you are to work with, Trivia Game.

From my experience as organizer/participant, folks really liked this and it was illuminating to see what can be a problem in a legacy code and where your refactoring can lead you astray (and how!). Here's yet another account of how it looks like, by Andreas Leidig.