How I Audit a Legacy Rails Codebase in the First Week

Ally Piechowski writes about auditing legacy Rails code, while the post does have specific Rails recommedations and guidlines, the pre-requiesties are universal -- the stakeholder interview.

You ask when the last time they deployed on a Friday was. They laugh. That laugh tells you more than any code metric could show you. It shows you that deploys are high stakes and that the team is living in fear of breaking production. On further investigation, you learn that there is no safe rollback procedure for deployment. If a deploy goes wrong, the team has to scramble to fix it in production. The server goes down, the team has to manually fix it. This is something static analysis won’t show you, but it’s also a critical signal of the codebase’s health.

She follows with a great list of questions to get started.

Discovered via Simon Willison's weblog