Re: real-world architectural refactoring in a dirty environment?

Folks;

first off, thanks very much for your interesting insights and thoughts
on that. To add a few comments:

> That should be http://martinfowler.com/bliki/StranglerApplication.html

Yes, I already stumbled across this a while ago, and I also dealt with
the WELC book for quite a while, all along with Fowlers Refactoring
book, the Clean Code Handbook and the Elephant / brownfield book. All
these, though particularly useful and rather interesting in terms of
learning and improving, so far left me with a couple of questions I
eventually lack experience to really deal with (the difference between
"knowing from books" and "knowing from having done a dozen times
before"):

- Starting with WELC, most of the approaches are obviously built around
  the idea of building a skeleton of reliable (functional, unit, ...)
  tests to refactor without putting the whole mess at risk.
  Unfortunately, in our environment, most of the core logic is
  implemented in a technology / language which, apart for a half-baked
  unit test framework that doesn't work right, doesn't have useful
  support for any kind of testing. So, doing functional testing almost
  immediately will end up building some sort of external logic and
  somehow attach this to the backend system, which is difficult because
  there is no real interface technology to do so. So, in order to do
  meaningful functional tests in any way will require a drastic amount
  of work and a bunch of fragile code which always will be prone to
  failure. I am not sure whether this is really helpful.