The idea behind it

The need

At Studocu, we move forward using an approach called the strangler fig pattern.

This basically means that whenever we adopt new technology, a new pattern, or a new approach to solve our problems, we don’t refactor the entire codebase at once, but we slowly replace the old implementation with the new one.

This presents a problem: both implementations, legacy and new, share the same codebase. As a result, developers (especially new developers that are not aware of what is legacy and what is not) can mistakenly base their code on old legacy code, simply because they don't know any better.

This bottles up in the PR process, where more experienced developers notice new code done with legacy components, so they leave comments explaining what the latest practices are.

The role of Phecks

Phecks is here to automate the previous process.

Each team is responsible of defining what is legacy and what is not in their codebase, and create the set of Checks that will make sure no new violations are introduced.

Phecks can be run as part of pre-push git-hooks, and/or as a CI check, so it catches problems before they get merged into the main branch.