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We Really Don't Know Jack About Maintenance

Posted by kdawson on from the phbs-to-the-contrary-notwithstanding dept.

davecb writes "The ACM has been kind enough to print Paul Stachour's and my 'jack' article about Software Maintenance. Paul first pointed out back in 1984 that we and our managers were being foolish — when we were still running Unix V7 — and if anything it's been getting worse. Turns out maintenance has been a 'solved problem in computer science' since at least then, and we're just beginning to rediscover it."

1 of 260 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Grrr by MrCawfee · · Score: 3, Informative

    How do you design software that is able to be maintained? Many of the techniques for software maintenance are designed by these institutions, so saying "Software Maintenance" is not computer science is a bit far fetched. Writing maintainable software isn't only in the Initech domain.

    And really if you are excluding software maintenance from the field of computer science, you pretty much have to exclude every other software technique. Techniques for writing maintainable code go hand in hand with every other development technique.