The first thing to do is make a copy of this repository in your personal GitHub account and make public. Please do not fork this repository as your solution will be visible to others undertaking this exercise.

The purpose of this exercise is to demonstrate your skills at designing test cases and refactoring a legacy codebase, safely.

The idea is not to re-write the code from scratch, but rather to practice taking small steps, running the tests often, and incrementally improve the design towards a solution that embodies OO principles and patterns.

Hi and welcome to team Gilded Rose. As you know, we are a small inn with a prime location in a prominent city ran by a friendly innkeeper named Allison. We also buy and sell only the finest goods. Unfortunately, our goods are constantly degrading in Quality as they approach their sell by date.

We have a system in place that updates our inventory for us. It was developed by a no-nonsense type named Leeroy, who has moved on to new adventures. Your task is to add the new feature to our system so that we can begin selling a new category of items. First an introduction to our system:

• All items have a SellIn value which denotes the number of days we have to sell the items
• All items have a Quality value which denotes how valuable the item is
• At the end of each day our system lowers both values for every item

Pretty simple, right? Well this is where it gets interesting:

• Once the sell by date has passed, Quality degrades twice as fast
• The Quality of an item is never negative
• "Aged Brie" actually increases in Quality the older it gets
• The Quality of an item is never more than 50
• "Sulfuras", being a legendary item, never has to be sold or decreases in Quality
• "Backstage passes", like aged brie, increases in Quality as its SellIn value approaches;
  • Quality increases by 2 when there are 10 days or less and by 3 when there are 5 days or less but
  • Quality drops to 0 after the concert

We have recently signed a supplier of conjured items. This requires an update to our system:

• "Conjured" items degrade in Quality twice as fast as normal items

Feel free to make any changes to the UpdateQuality method and add any new code as long as everything still works correctly. However, do not alter the Item class or Items property as those belong to the goblin in the corner who will insta-rage and one-shot you as he doesn't believe in shared code ownership (you can make the UpdateQuality method and Items property static if you like, we'll cover for you).

Just for clarification, an item can never have its Quality increase above 50, however "Sulfuras" is a legendary item and as such its Quality is 80 and it never alters.

This is a testing approach which is very useful when refactoring legacy code. Before you change the code, you run it, and gather the output of the code as a plain text file. You review the text, and if it correctly describes the behaviour as you understand it, you can "approve" it, and save it as a "Golden Master". Then after you change the code, you run it again, and compare the new output against the Golden Master. Any differences, and the test fails.

It's basically the same idea as "assertEquals(expected, actual)" in a unit test, except the text you are comparing is typically much longer, and the "expected" value is saved from actual output, rather than being defined in advance.

Typically a piece of legacy code may not produce suitable textual output from the start, so you may need to modify it before you can write your first text-based approval test. This has already been setup and the initial "Golden Master" has been provided in ApprovalTest.ThirtyDays.verified.txt