Look at any long standing software site, Drupal.org, being no exception, and you'll find abandoned projects everywhere. As time goes on, this becomes a veritible junkyard of code. Junkyards can be scary places, but they are also full of really useful building blocks that can be recycled and repurposed into something new.

But how do you go about this sanely? I'll talk about the lessons I learned here in becoming an accidental maintainer of the epublish module. This lead to a number of very broken releases, nearly giving up, then realizing that if I dove in and understood SimpleTest, the task was now both approachable and fun as a mear mortal.

Stories will be told, examples shown, and a gental introduction to SimpleTest that will let you start using it on your own projects right away.