Maintenance And Methodologies

It is important for a software process to recognize and support the MaintenanceProgrammer. ExtremeProgramming as a process supports this area by giving the programmers UnitTests and FunctionalTests. Without these tools, a MaintenanceProgrammer is forced to rely on BigBangTesting and TestingByPokingAround. -- FrancisTownsend

ExtremeProgramming seems to be centered around the idea of maintenance of the code, does anyone else get this feeling?

ExtremeProgramming seems to remove the distinction between development and maintenance. -- EricHerman

I read a talk abstract the other day that lamented that 80% of software development dollars were spent on maintenance. My immediate reaction was, "What would it take to get that up to 95%?" -- KentBeck

Should we distinguish between CorrectiveMaintenance? and PreventiveMaintenance? ?

ImprovingTheDesignOfExistingCode is difficult when you don't have the source. The OpenSource movement is working on that problem.

I've argued for years that all software work is a kind of corrective maintenance. In the sense that there is nearly always a pre-existing way of doing things (manual? mechanical? intuitive?) which we about to replace.

The classical stats was that 60-80% of software work was changing existing code. SlashDot just posted the figure that only 47 days in the work year are dedicated to adding new functionality/code.

-- DickBotting

The TgpMethodology is a new approach that tries to tackle the maintenance issue. It is based on IncrementalDevelopment so most of the development is done in a maintenance mode (TgpProcess). However, the Involvement of BusinessProfessionals and using the TgpArchitecture hands tools to avoid some of the problems by a better connection to the business domain and to respond quickly by flexible architecture -- OriInbar