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Unmaintable Code - It doesn’t have to be this hard…

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Two of my all time favorite authors, Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates, coined the phrase, ”Code [your project] as if the next guy to maintain it is a homicidal maniac who knows where you live.” I truly wish more people would take that to heart.  All too often I am working on a maintenance task, and I find that I spend more time trying to figure out what the hell the code is doing than I spend actually fixing the bug.

Take, for instance, the following real code snippet that a colleague of mine recently sent me…

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Idol Marketing

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imageApple definitely knows how to feed off the buzz.

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Reflections from SD West 2008

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SD West, one of the nation’s premier software development conventions, just concluded SD West 2008.  Yours truly was fortunate enough to be able to attend, and for an entire fun filled week I got to embrace my inner geek and participate in tutorials on Agile Estimating and Planning, attend classes on Test Driven Development, and visit expo booths to play Guitar Hero (Hey - we may be developers, but we’re aren’t total nerds!).  I even managed to go on a Segway Tour of San Francisco.  OK, that last one was a little nerdy, but still pretty fun!

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Trend: Why Buy Servers and Software?

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It appears more companies are asking whether they should be hosting their own software and server solutions, and are instead looking at pay-as-you-use, web-based solutions. According to this article at TechCrunch, half of all IT spending is allocated to software and hardware purchases. That kind of money buys a lot of software services that can be accessed via the Web. It also eliminates some of the considerable costs and headaches that are associated with maintaining on-premise solutions. With many businesses concerned with the effects of a looming U.S. recession, there will be additional pressure for IT departments to find ways to provide essential services with less outlay. As a result, web-based solutions may be on the table.

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Software Maintenance.  How Far Have We Come in 15 years?

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In 1993, the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University published a study named A Study in Software Maintenance.  As part of this study, one task was to examine the development processes and the software tools used within maintenance (life-cycle support) projects.  Three pervasive themes presented themselves in the findings: Tools, People, and Software Process.

This is the first in a three part blog to compare the findings of that 1993 paper with the general climate of software maintenance today.  The first area of findings that we will look at is the area of Tools.

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