Toss Me a Rope: Programming Yourself Into a Hole?

ksyrium queries: "Managers tend to think that once a project is out the door or 'live,' it's done and over with, and assigns developers new project. However, with each project, another portion of each developers' time becomes devoted to maintaining said project. I've seen co-workers reach thresholds where there can no longer take on new work for sake of maintaining existing code. How are Slashdotters (developers and managers alike!) approaching this problem? Obviously, well-written and documented code can allow for faster maintenance by both the original developer and others, but has there been any organizational research done in the area of managing this problem? While I code for a living, my degree is in business, and this was a question dodged in all of my Management of Information Systems and Project Management courses. Google and other search engines haven't turned up much in the way of research, so I'd like to know what Slashdot thinks!"

Comments

Stabilization period

[pthisis]

Managers tend to think that once a project is out the door or 'live,' it's done and over with, and assigns developers new project.

That is a problem. You need to get managers to understand that once a project launches, there's going to be a stabilization period that's just as intense as the development period. It can be short or long depending on the project, but it needs to happen.

And you need to get programmers to believe that they _can_, in fact, get the code to a state where it just runs. That means having watchdogs to monitor it rather than people (sending email when it dies, and avoiding false positives). That means taking the 2-3 (or 20) hours to fix things that require "just 5 minutes" of attention every day. It also means isolating the system into as many independent parts as possible so that it's manageable and easy to work with.

As an example, I worked on developing a massive dynamic content system for a past job. It required a GUI for content authors to do input with, a way to schedule and deploy changes, a server to select content based on user parameters, a way to track content to see what was served where, inventory analysis of what web space would be available, etc. It took over a year to develop, had more than 15 seperate executables built from 75,000 lines of code, and was hell when it launched in terms of making sure it ran happily with all the other systems in place. One daemon needed to be restarted occasionally; sometimes unforeseen log data screwed up reports; etc. We could have just gone ahead and restarted that daemon when it needed it, fixed the logs by hand, and so forth--instead we put the up-front time into fixing the root causes of each of the tiny maintenance chores as we identified them.

Within 3 months it was pretty much hands off, and would send email alerts when something went wrong that the watchdogs couldn't handle. Moreover, because it was 15 seperate components, feature enhancements were generally easy: change one small program instead of a huge monolithic one. We went through several iterations of feature requests over the following year, each one followed by a stabilization period, and eventually got it to the point where it does everything we needed done and did it without needing handholding (and serves 6 billion requests per year).

That's what you need to aim for as a programmer--ongoing maintenance tasks when you don't have feature requests coming in is a sign that the code needs to be more robust.

Sumner