Object Oriented: Good, Procedural: Bad, Right?
For all of you old-time RPG developers, remember back when Object-Oriented programming first become popular and it was supposed to be the salvation of maintenance programmers and facilitate tons and tons of code reuse? I think by now we all know that OO did not save the world, but I think we all do have the general idea that it does make maintenance easier – or does it? I was reading a research paper from 2007, The Process of Software Maintenance: A Comparison of Object-Oriented and Third-Generation Development Languages, ($) by Michael Eierman and Mark Dishaw. The authors note...
read moreDoes Documentation Help Maintenance?
One of the truisms of IT is that there’s never enough documentation. But ask yourself, your scientific self, does documentation really help software maintenance, and if so, what kind exactly and how? These kinds of questions are very difficult to answer as it’s very difficult and costly to arrange controlled experiments. Some researchers, however, have managed to execute at least small scale experiments and one such example was reported in “The Impact of UML Documentation on Software Maintenance: An Experimental Evaluation” ($) by Erik Arisholm, et al. As is common in such...
read moreSoftware Maintainability – Is Anyone Managing This?
As noted in an earlier post, “the act itself of maintaining software causes it to degrade.” (Alain April, Software Maintenance Management) The continual decline of software has also been noted in the Laws of Software Evolution, as conceived by Professor Meir Lehman. Can anything be done about this? Should anything be done? Is it worth the cost and effort to keep software healthy and maintainable? I don’t think the science of software maintenance has advanced enough yet to consistently provide the methods for answering those questions, but I was reading some interesting...
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