Maintenance, in a nutshell
May. 10th, 2007 07:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rbandrewsAll maintenance programming,
all maintenance programming,
all maintenance programming,
can be reduced to one task:
"This works with one. We want it to work with many."
This doesn't mean that you should make everything work work many by default. If you do that, correctly, then you would theoretically have no maintenance to do. However, it would add so much complexity to your program that you would have to configure it yourself every time, which is worse, because it's just like maintenance programming, except with your buggy environment instead of the compiler's good environment.
It means, like anything else in programming, that you should use judgment. To remove problems before they occur, make the right things work with many. Anyone who says "you aren't gonna need it" or "do it just in case" as blanket philosophies can be safely ignored.
all maintenance programming,
all maintenance programming,
can be reduced to one task:
"This works with one. We want it to work with many."
This doesn't mean that you should make everything work work many by default. If you do that, correctly, then you would theoretically have no maintenance to do. However, it would add so much complexity to your program that you would have to configure it yourself every time, which is worse, because it's just like maintenance programming, except with your buggy environment instead of the compiler's good environment.
It means, like anything else in programming, that you should use judgment. To remove problems before they occur, make the right things work with many. Anyone who says "you aren't gonna need it" or "do it just in case" as blanket philosophies can be safely ignored.
