Experimenting with Scientist .NET

Scientist .NET is a library built by GitHub for scientifically refactoring the critical parts of your application.

Let’s say you have a portion of your application that is vital to what the business does but has a significant amount of technical debt. You want to refactor it, but you’re afraid of breaking anything and your existing tests are not sufficient to address those fears, but you’re not sure what tests you need to add. In your estimation, the only thing that will let you feel good about your new code is to see how it does in production.

This is what Scientist .NET helps with. Scientist .NET lets you deploy your new code alongside the legacy code it hopes to replace and compares the results of the two pieces of code. Alternatively, Scientist .NET can be used in unit tests to verify that the old version of a component and the new version of the component achieves the same results.

This concept will hopefully be a...