system quality aspect characterizing the ease of software maintenance
3
votes
1answer
62 views
What aspects of “maintainability” can influence choice of IS implementation technology?
Background: I'm an apprentice and am handling the project of developing a particular IS-System. Currently I'm only managing the requirements analysis and the information-processes design, but as a ...
1
vote
2answers
233 views
Prevent code from getting mess [duplicate]
I am a student and a freelance programmer. These days I am developing a software in VB6 which has recently crossed 100KB of source code.
The main problem, I face is, many times I have to refactor my ...
1
vote
1answer
83 views
How to keep my Activity code readable and maintainable?
I have written a rather small App with only one activity. From my understanding an activity has to be seen as kind of a view and controller in one class.
But even for a little app, with 3 dialogs ...
4
votes
2answers
291 views
Is there a name for being able to quickly find the relevant code?
I notice that a property of codebases that I like hacking on is that it's quick to find the relevant code for some feature, without knowing much about the code base at all. For example, searching for ...
9
votes
3answers
461 views
What to do when your colleagues don't value code maintainability [duplicate]
I've been working in the same software development department for a few years now. In that time, the average stay of a developer has been 6-9 months. A handful have been around for over 2 years, but ...
1
vote
2answers
178 views
JavaScript codes complexity and maintainability [closed]
I am trying to make my way back to JavaScript (been there last time some 7 years ago) with the help of lovely "Eloquent JavaScript" book.
While I admire author's capabilities and approach, I have ...
6
votes
1answer
196 views
Are there any empirical studies about the effects of commenting source code on software quality, maintainability and developer productivity?
I am an advocate of commenting on source code and documenting software products. It is my personal experience and observation that working on source code that is rigorously commented has helped me in ...
-1
votes
3answers
148 views
Programming task to test for focus on maintainability [closed]
I am looking for a programming task, which shows whether the coder has maintainability in mind while programming. I imagine giving a task to fix a bug in a method. It should be clear to the programmer ...
4
votes
2answers
365 views
Creating huge decision tree
I'm to write an event correlator. A fundamental part of the system will be a decision tree that recognizes the origin of the fault basing on recorded states and log files.
Often many accidents will ...
25
votes
11answers
2k views
Maintenance wise, is `else while` without intervening braces considered safe?
Is else while without intervening braces considered "safe" maintenance wise?
Writing if-else code without braces like below...
if (blah)
foo();
else
bar();
...carries a risk because the ...
8
votes
5answers
539 views
Which is more maintainable — boolean assignment via if/else or boolean expression?
Which would be considered more maintainable?
if (a == b) c = true; else c = false;
or
c = (a == b);
I've tried looking in Code Complete, but can't find an answer.
I think the first is more ...
23
votes
10answers
2k views
Are flag variables an absolute evil?
I remember doing a couple of projects where I totally neglected using flags and ended up with better architecture/code; however, it is a common practice in other projects I work at, and when code ...
2
votes
6answers
415 views
Is it a bad practice to write shell script with many if-else statment and for loops?
I am maintaing several data process shell scripts which are full of if-else statements and for loops . I try to make the scritps tidy and easy to debug.
When I read some suggestions about shell code ...
8
votes
2answers
388 views
How is technical debt best measured? What metric(s) are most useful? [duplicate]
Possible Duplicate:
How can I quantify the amount of technical debt that exists in a project?
If I wanted to help a customer understand the degree of technical debt in his application, what ...
4
votes
2answers
207 views
How to have a maintainable and manageable Javascript code base [closed]
I am starting a new job soon as a frontend developer. The App I would be working on is 100% Javascript on the client side. all the server returns is an index page that loads all the Javascript files ...
7
votes
1answer
282 views
Futures/Monads vs Events
In an application framework
when performance impact can be ignored (10-20 events per second at max),
what is more maintainable and flexible to use as a preferred medium for communication between ...
2
votes
3answers
371 views
When creating a library for a simple program, what must I do to protect others from its lack of thread safety?
When creating a library for a simple program, is it more cost effective to make it thread safe or is there a way to detect the program's use in a multithreaded program and ASSERT() or otherwise ...
3
votes
2answers
277 views
Questions about identifying the components in MVC
I'm currently developing an client-server application in node.js, Express, mustache and MySQL. However, I believe this question should be mostly language and framework agnostic.
This is the first ...
0
votes
2answers
341 views
Are CK Metrics still considered useful? Is there an open source tool to help?
Chidamber & Kemerer proposed several metrics for object oriented code. Among them, depth of inheritance tree, weighted number of methods, number of member functions, number of children, and ...
3
votes
6answers
611 views
What to do when you inherit an unmaintainable codebase? [duplicate]
Possible Duplicate:
Techniques to re-factor garbage and maintain sanity?
I've inherited 200K lines of spaghetti code — what now?
I'm currently working at a company with 2 other ...
3
votes
5answers
340 views
Practices for navigating and changing “long” code files?
Many a times I have to deal with code files which are quite long - about 5 screen pages at the minimum. Almost always there is something towards the top/bottom that I need to refer when I'm at the ...
2
votes
4answers
315 views
Does it still make sense to think about effective code on micro scale in C++?
Early in my programming career I was in love with pointer twiddling, lean code, doing everything with as little layers of abstraction as possible and so on. The code was very C like I would say, close ...
3
votes
2answers
571 views
God Files versus Ravioli Code
Recently I asked a question about whether or not I should refactor my code. the responses I received were most definitely in the camp of going through with the refactoring due to the presence of a God ...
5
votes
3answers
276 views
Starting on a large project, should I split it into more concise parts?
Background: Currently an intern at a company and working on repurposing older programs (still in use, but for different departments) for use in testing new hardware. The new hardware is different in ...
4
votes
5answers
314 views
Keep coding the wrong way to remain consistent? [duplicate]
Possible Duplicate:
Code maintenance: keeping a bad pattern when extending new code for being consistent, or not?
To keep things simple let's say I am responsible for maintaining two ...
6
votes
1answer
165 views
What is the best way to approach visualization projects?
I work on several areas related to information visualization, linked data, computer vision and other stuff, so mainly front-end. I am not really happy with the fact that visualizations take lots of ...
66
votes
19answers
4k views
Is it ok to replace optimized code with readable code?
Sometimes you run into a situation where you have to extend/improve some existing code. You see that the old code is very lean, but it's also difficult to extend, and takes time to read.
Is it a good ...
5
votes
3answers
212 views
Filesystem like permissions for C++ type-members
Abstract (tl;dr)
Please read the full question, this is awfully simplified:
How can unix file permission style restrictions be applied to inter-type data/control flows, allowing fine-grained access ...
18
votes
7answers
572 views
How to improve the training of students regarding maintainability?
Maintainability is a major stake of professional software development. Indeed, maintenance is nearly always the longest part of a software life cycle, as it lasts from the project release until ...
3
votes
2answers
129 views
Deprecated Methods in Code Base
A lot of the code I've been working on recently, both professionally (read: at work) and in other spheres (read: at home, for friends/family/etc, or NOT FOR WORK), has been worked on, redesigned and ...
68
votes
17answers
5k views
How would you know if you've written readable and easily maintainable code?
How would one know if the code he created is easily maintainable and readable? Of course in your point of view (the one who written the code) your code is readable and maintainable, but we should be ...
0
votes
3answers
261 views
What can I do to make sure my code gets maintained in a developer light environment? [closed]
I am a contract data analyst, so I bounce between jobs every 3-6 months, which I find to be a good fit for me, but it leads to some problems when it comes to coding. I mostly do statistics (I've asked ...
63
votes
17answers
7k views
Coding Guideline : Methods shouldn't contain more than 7 statements?
I was looking through the AvSol Coding Guidelines for C# and I agree with nearly everything but I'm really curious to see what other think of one specific rule.
AV1500
Methods should not ...
37
votes
10answers
3k views
What characteristics or features make code maintainable?
I used to think I knew what this was, until I really started thinking about it... "maintainable"... what exactly makes code maintainable?
To me, if code must be maintainable that means we can expect ...
115
votes
20answers
5k views
How to keep a big and complex software product maintainable over the years?
I have been working as a software developer for many years now. It has been my experience that projects get more complex and unmaintainable as more developers get involved in the development of the ...
9
votes
2answers
315 views
Programming paradigms and the maintenance developer [closed]
I was reading, Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering, which has a section of maintenance. Since, I'm have been a maintenance developer for years now, I was very interesting facts presented. ...
63
votes
17answers
3k views
What hurts maintainability?
For someone who doesn't have much real world experience yet, the notion of maintainable code is a bit vague, even though it follows from typical good practice rules. Intuitively I can tell that code ...
11
votes
6answers
1k views
How to refactor code to some common code?
Background
I'm working on an ongoing C# project. I'm not a C# programmer, primarily a C++ programmer. So I was assigned basically easy and refactoring tasks.
The code is a mess. It's a huge project. ...
2
votes
4answers
230 views
Maintaining Regex in a .net application
I am sure everybody has had his/her share of regex woes.
We have a big application with around 30 developers working on a mvc3 web application , and the two fold regex validations (front-end and ...
19
votes
14answers
2k views
Why do so many developers believe performance, readability, and maintainability cannot coexist?
While responding to this question, I began to wonder why so many developers believe a good design should not account for performance because doing so would affect readability and/or maintainability.
...
2
votes
6answers
206 views
Complexity vs maintainability in modern hardware
Today with the modern hardware and memory coming cheap, how much sense does it make to spend effort to analyze algoriths or data structure complexity?
Wouldn't it be better instead, to focus on clean, ...
10
votes
5answers
448 views
Should you refactor existing code that is not broken in a project focused on new features?
Given a small project that aims to add new functionality to application, the changes introduced touch some existing code, involving updating these in certain areas. During implementation, I've found ...
0
votes
6answers
383 views
What information should a good (method- / class-) comment contain?
This is something that has bothering me for a while now. I guess there are a couple of obvious important things that should go into a comment, such as:
The author(s)
A description of the parameters ...
43
votes
9answers
5k views
Clean readable code vs fast hard to read code. When to cross the line?
When I write code I always try to make my code as clean and readable as possible.
Every now and then there comes a time when you need to cross the line and go from nice clean code to slightly uglier ...
4
votes
2answers
276 views
Using lookahead assertions in regular expressions
I use regular expressions on a daily basis, as my daily work is 90% in Perl (legacy codebase, but that's a different issue). Despite this, I still find lookahead and lookbehind to be terribly ...
7
votes
6answers
855 views
Is it necessary to write a javadoc comment for EVERY parameter in a method's signature?
One of the devs on my team believes that it is necessary to write a javadoc comment for EVERY parameter in a method's signature. I do not think this is necessary, and in fact I think it can even be ...
6
votes
6answers
2k views
Automatic source code generation — good idea or potential nightmare?
In response to my question regarding Java source code generation, I received this answer warning me about potential maintenance problems:
mixing auto-generated code always pose a risk of ...
5
votes
9answers
514 views
Are all dirty fixes created equal?
I have seen some dirty code in my time. I have heard varied feedback about "dirty fixes" too:
a) a dirty "fix" is not a fix
b) some fixes dirtier than others but dirty
fixes are not acceptable
...
3
votes
2answers
208 views
An event that raises itself - is it too complicated?
I have a little problem. I'm writing a resource loading and caching system, in which user can request a resource, and set a callback to be called when resource is loaded (and/or wait for load to ...
17
votes
9answers
1k views
Eliminating Magic Numbers: When is it time to say “No”?
We're all aware that magic numbers (hard-coded values) can wreak havoc in your program, especially when it's time to modify a section of code that has no comments, but where do you draw the line?
...
