Golden Master on legacy code

Blog post series

This blog post is part of a series about legacy coderetreat and legacy code techniques you can apply during your work. Please click to see more sessions about legacy code.

Purpose

Whenever you start dealing with an existing software system you need to have a basic safety net. This basic safety net will make sure that whenever you change big things in the code, the changes will not affect the existing functionality. You can read more about this concept in the generic session Part 2 – From Nothing to System Tests.

As mentioned in the above entry, we want to start with some basic safety feature that will let us test the code in a generic way, focusing only on inputs and on outputs and without changing the production code. So we will treat the system as a black box (we do not care about the internal behaviour of the system, we care just about the whole system inputs and outputs) and we will test only the outputs for given inputs.

The Golden Master technique is very useful when a clear input and output is easy to obtain on the system level. There are some cases where the Golden Master technique can be applied with difficulty or where it cannot be applied at all. We will discuss these situations further as well.

In audio mastering, a golden master is a model disk used as a reference to create disks in the old vinyl industry. This disk was cut in metal and it would contain the sound transferred from a microphone (see here more details). In the software world we took this name and we started using it for a fixed reference of a system output, paired with a system input.

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