I recently heard of the concept of a Legacy Code Retreat. Since I have attended and helped facilitate some normal Code Retreats I thought it might be interesting in trying a Legacy Code Retreat, but I have a few questions on how a legacy CR differs from a normal one. If anyone has attended a Legacy CR and has some suggestions on how best to host these event’s please leave a comment on what has worked for you in the past or if you have any answers to my questions below…

Should you restrict the languages that people can do the sessions in?

In the normal CR’s I have been involved in the past we have had people attend and code in their programming language of choice. A normal CR lends itself to  this because each session starts with no code. With a legacy CR each session seems to start with an existing code base.

Is there some sort of limitation on the languages that people can work in during the sessions? If not, how do you give them a base to start from?

What happens as the beginning of each session?

In the normal CR that I have attended each session would have a constraint set on it – i.e. no if statements used, no primitives, etc. With a legacy CR it seems more like patterns for refactoring are learned.

Does the facilitator explain the pattern used before the session starts or are they just given a code base to start from and an objective to achieve