I'm not necessarily disagreeing with the author, but I think if you are going to 'do agile', especially in a breaky language like C++, you need to do tests. Lots.
The current shop I'm at is maintaining a huge code base, parts of which go back 20 years. Because test coverage is so low, there is a real reluctance to refactor.
The first thing I did when I started here was to clean up the code, renaming miss-named variables to get it in line with the coding standard, adding autopointers here and there to head off memory leaks. By gosh, I nearly got fired.
If you are going to fearlessly edit your codebase, you need to know that regressions are going to be caught. You need automated testing.
The current shop I'm at is maintaining a huge code base, parts of which go back 20 years. Because test coverage is so low, there is a real reluctance to refactor.
The first thing I did when I started here was to clean up the code, renaming miss-named variables to get it in line with the coding standard, adding autopointers here and there to head off memory leaks. By gosh, I nearly got fired.
If you are going to fearlessly edit your codebase, you need to know that regressions are going to be caught. You need automated testing.