The document discusses Michael Feather's book "Working Effectively with Legacy Code" which provides an approach for refactoring and modifying legacy code using automatic tests. It defines legacy code as code without automatic tests which leads to risks in changing the code. The approach involves writing characterization tests that describe the actual behavior of the existing code to use as regression tests during refactoring. An example is provided of writing characterization tests for a method to illustrate testing existing behavior before refactoring.