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We Really Don't Know Jack About Maintenance
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."
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I beg to differ, in my computer science classes at the University of Missouri Rolla, they taught us software maintenance to go along with our programming classes. It is for more than just business software or application software it can be used for system software as well as operating systems, firmware, database applications, and everything else except the kitchen sink (but we are working on that one, he heh heh:).
If you don't do maintenance for your software, it is a lot like not doing maintenance for your car, eventually you'll run into trouble and then it will be more costly to repair (how much is a day or two of downtime worth to your firm?) than it would have been to do the maintenance of your software.
They don't teach software maintenance, debugging, documentation, legacy systems and legacy software, best practices, etc in computer science classes anymore, or the professors just skip over them or the students don't pay close attention anymore. Because I've worked with Comp Sci graduates that had no idea how to do any of them, and it was always up to be to debug their program and do software maintenance on them. Because I solved many problems that everyone else said couldn't be done, I kept getting promotions. But the work got really hard and I got stressed out and got sick and eventually got fired. It seemed out of a team of 30 developers, I was the only one able to fix the problems and avoid the system and servers crashing 12 times a day or more due to sloppy programming. But they fired me anyway for getting too sick at work, and keep on the sloppy programmers. I read the Microsoft Newsgroups they use for support and read by searching my former employer's domain name on how they struggled to migrate to Dotnet and couldn't get the Dotnet versions of the programs working as well as the ones I fixed and maintained. How could I, the only competent developer they had, been fired when they needed me for the Dotnet migration? It is simple, managers and developers don't want to do things like software maintenance or even debugging or best practices because they consider them "time wasters" and "unneeded expenses" and that the work I did cost them an expense they didn't need, so they didn't need me. But they were so blind to see that the work I did while it was an expense, it saved then millions of dollars in lost productivity, lost CPU time, cost savings in not needing to buy faster processors and more memory as my code ran tight and compact in lower ones, and days if not weeks of downtime and a dysfunctional system and software that takes them years to fix by hiring high priced contractors to do the work I would have done for my small salary.
Yes I am convinced that if I am well enough to return to work, to become that high priced consultant and do debugging, best practices, software maintenance, etc because 99.9% of the market doesn't know how or doesn't want to do those things.
Before they let me go the VP of IT told me this "You are a developer, developers are a dime a dozen. We get 500 resumes a week just for your position alone. We can easily hire someone at a fraction of your current salary who won't get sick on the job." After they let me go they realized that I wasn't some dime a dozen programmer, but too late, can't change the past. If they want me back, I'll be a high priced contractor with an iron clad contract that contains bonuses, stock options, and other things in it.
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... and a partridge in a pear tree....
I thought WORKSFORME is Mozillaese for DeveloperInDenial?
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