Questions tagged [maintenance]
The activities that occur after deployment of a software system. This includes making modifications to released systems, training, operating, and transitioning to support organizations.
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Policy and practice on code maintenance
I just came out of University and have been working at this company for roughly 8 months, while I was given the title of developer, most of the time I have spent on is fixing and debugging other ...
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How to convince my coworkers that doing things right will save them time
I recently started at a new company, with a handful of programmers. Its a medium sized company, with around 70 employees, but IT only has 9-10, and there are 3 "programmers" beside myself. However, ...
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Functional testing before code checkin
I am working on a project with legacy code where it does not have much code coverage. One of the idea to improve that is to enforce a rule that each code check-in must have test, not only test but ...
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How can I determine how to charge for supporting SharePoint sites and SharePoint development? [closed]
I recently created a site in SharePoint and I need to setup a maintenance/support agreement for the site. In addition to the site, there are some custom modules that were developed that we monitor. ...
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What tools or techniques are useful for describing an unfamiliar codebase? [closed]
When manually inspecting unfamiliar code (to review or modify), I seem to have three options.
A top-down read of the code, choosing each next source file by how fundamental the filename seems. I ...
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How would you react if someone told you your code is a mess?
I am a good programmer, or so I thought before. I always love to program. And I want to learn many things about programming to make me a better programmer. I studied programming for 1 year and now I ...
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1
answer
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What should I aware of , when preparing a document of website for later maintenance use? [closed]
The development team has finished a website and my duty is to prepare a document so that other programmers can maintain the website with ease.
I have no experience in this and would like to ask what ...
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What is the way to understand someone else's giant uncommented spaghetti code? [duplicate]
Possible Duplicate:
I’ve inherited 200K lines of spaghetti code — what now?
I have been recently handled a giant multithreaded program with no comments and have been asked to understand what it ...
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5
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What is the concept of software wear and tear?
I have heard that over time, software can begin to show signs of wear and tear.
What does wear and tear of software mean?
Software itself not being a physical entity, so how can there be wear and ...
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Is there an opposite for the term "Backporting"?
As I understand, the term "Backporting" is used to describe a fix which is applied in a future version which is also ported to a previous version. Wikipedia definition is as follows:
Backporting is ...
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How do people maintain their test suite?
In particular, I'm curious about the following aspects:
How do you know that your test cases are wrong (or out-of-date) and needed to be repaired (or discarded)? I mean, even if a test case became ...
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How to handle this unfortunately non hypothetical situation with end-users?
I work in a medium sized company but with a very small IT force.
Last year (2011), I wrote an application that is very popular with a large group of end-users. We hit a deadline at the end of last ...
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Copy-and-Pasted Test Code: How Bad is This?
My current job is mostly writing GUI test code for various applications that we work on. However, I find that I tend to copy and paste a lot of code within tests. The reason for this is that the areas ...
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"Opportunity" to take over maintenance of a small internal website. What should I do?
I have been offered an "opportunity" to take over maintenance of a small internal website run by my group that provides information about schedules and photos of events the groups done.
My manager ...
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Maintenance model for external artifacts
When we think about maintaining a software solution holistically, we have to think about things like non-code change control and configuration management, in addition to the actual source code. For ...
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What Are Some Tips For Writing A Large Number of Unit Tests? [closed]
I've recently been tasked with testing some COM objects of the desktop app I work on. What this means in practice is writing a large number (>100) unit tests to test different but related methods and ...
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What is the best approach to getting to know a big system like a CMS or forum system which has no documentation?
My problem is the following; I need to get to know a totally new system, for example Wordpress, Drupal, or a framework like Symfony, or maybe a big forum system like PhpBB.
Let's suppose it has no ...
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How do you break out of the role of a code maintainer? [closed]
In my last three jobs, I was a code maintainer. In all three cases, I was hired after the majority of the code for the project was already written.
I'm a self taught programmer. Before I ever started ...
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6
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How to fix a project with basically no structure?
I've been working on a software project mostly solo for over 5 years. It was a mess to begin with (I am the third or fourth developer to be working on it), and although it's less of a mess now it is ...
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Should we ever delete data in a database?
I am new to databases and trying to understand the basic concepts. I have learned how to delete data in a database. But one of my friends told me that you should never delete data in a database. ...
user4124
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Handling fast growing multi-function services
My team has been developing a web business application for more than a year. It started quite small, but now it is growing bigger and bigger. I think it's time for refactoring.
Looking at the code, I ...
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How to ease the maintenance of event driven code?
When using an event based component I often feel some pain at maintenance phase.
Since the executed code is all split around it can be quite hard to figure what will be all the code part that will ...
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I've inherited 200K lines of spaghetti code -- what now?
I hope this isn't too general of a question; I could really use some seasoned advice.
I am newly employed as the sole "SW Engineer" in a fairly small shop of scientists who have spent the last 10-20 ...
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Zero as a constant?
I have come across this programming idiom recently:
const float Zero = 0.0;
which is then used in comparisons:
if (x > Zero) {..}
Can anyone explain if this is really any more efficient or ...
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How do you call the process of taking a part of a function and making an individual function of it?
I know there was a technical term for this. I'm just can't remember what it was.
If the title needs clarification, here is what I mean; If this is the old code:
Result foobar(Param1,Param2,Param3) {
...
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How should I write new code when the old codebase and the environment uses lots of globals in PHP
I'm working in the Wordpress environment which itself heavily relies on globals and the codebase I'm maintaining introduces some more. I want this to change and so I'm trying to think how should I ...
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After how much line of code a function should be break down?
While working on existing code base, I usually come across procedures that contain Abusive use of IF and Switch statements. The procedures consist of overwhelming code, which I think require re-...
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Bringing in New Architecture During Maintenance on Legacy Systems
I have been tasked with adding some new features to a legacy ASP.NET MVC2 project. The codebase is a disaster and I want to write these new features with some thought behind the implementation and not ...
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I'm doing 90% maintenance and 10% development, is this normal? [closed]
I have just recently started my career as a web developer for a medium sized company. As soon as I started I got the task of expanding an existing application (badly coded, developed by multiple ...
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How to manage a developer who has poor communication skills
I manage a small team of developers on an application which is in the mid-point of its lifecycle, within a big firm. This unfortunately means there is commonly a 30/70 split of Programming tasks to "...
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What are some ways to maintain codebases written in two languages that implement the same logic?
I have a logic intensive algorithm that I need to code in two languages (actually I finished it in one language satisfactorily and am about to start coding in the other language). By logic intensive ...
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Working on someone else's code [closed]
I have hardly a year's experience in coding. After I started working, most of the time I would be working on someone else's code, either adding new features over the existing ones or modifying the ...
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Linking in code comments (to other unique anchors/comments)
How would you recommend creating "anchors" in code comments, so that during maintenance, developers can easily cross-reference other code comments.
I realise that software should be intelligently ...
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initial Class design: access modifiers and no-arg constructors
Context:
Student working through Class design in personal/side project for Summer. I've never written anything implemented by others or had to maintain code. Trying to maximize encapsulation and ...
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switch statement - handling default case when it can't be reached
If I'm using a switch statement to handle values from an enum (which is owned by my class) and I have a case for each possible value - is it worth adding code to handle the "default" case?
enum ...
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Understanding already existing complex code base [duplicate]
Possible Duplicate:
What is the most effective way to add functionality to unfamiliar, structurally unsound code?
Till now, all I have worked on is with Java projects that I build from scratch (...
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7
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How to improve the training of students regarding maintainability? [closed]
Maintainability is a major stake of professional software development. Indeed, maintenance is nearly always the longest part of a software life cycle, as it lasts from the project release until ...
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GIS-based data visualization and maintenance tool
Background
Looking to leverage an existing GIS system for exploring organizational data.
Architecture
The following figure represents a high-level overview of the system's desired features:
The ...
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4
answers
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Should large or old codebases be expected to be easy to navigate?
I'm an Undergraduate Computer Science Student currently on a placement year at a company that produces and supports a large enterprise web application. I'm loving the experience of seeing how software ...
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Is the creation of brand new software generally a major part of most programming jobs? [closed]
I have worked in software development for over 10 years now, and it's dawning on me that I rarely get to create anything "new". I realize that "new" is a vague term, but I would define it as anything ...
2
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5
answers
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Best practices for App Idea ownership and shares [closed]
I am developing apps on my sparetime. I am the sole developer, and two non-programmer friends of mine provide vision, content, algorithms and ideas. We always agree happily on all the features, todos ...
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When is it acceptable to NOT fix broken windows?
In reference to broken windows, are there times when refactoring is best left for a future activity?
For example, if a project to add some new features to an existing internal system is assigned to a ...
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I just started a job with Scrum and something seems to be missing. I am new to Scrum
The code is a complete mess of a combination of classic ASP/ASP.NET. The scrum consist of us patching up the big mess or making additions to it. We are all too busy doing that to start a rewrite so I ...
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Readability of || statements
On HTML5 Boilerplate they use this code for jQuery:
<script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.2/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script>window.jQuery || document.write('<...
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To reorganize code, what to choose between library and service?
I want to reorganize a large application with lot of code duplication into multiple components. Plus, some code is also duplicated over other applications.
The common set of functionality that can be ...
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Facing quality issues
A workforce management software has complex GUI (for example values in a page depends on the status (closed or open) of other pages). Only latest and near past development has test coverage. During ...
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3
answers
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What can I do to make sure my code gets maintained in a developer light environment? [closed]
I am a contract data analyst, so I bounce between jobs every 3-6 months, which I find to be a good fit for me, but it leads to some problems when it comes to coding. I mostly do statistics (I've asked ...
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Becoming a Better Bug-Fixer
I love being a programmer. There, I said it. However, with that said, I've realized lately that I really can't stand bug-fixing. At all.
In fact, while I'm developing something, my productivity is ...
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4
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Communications regarding maintainability of code [duplicate]
I'm in search of good language or metaphors to discuss the maintainability of code with non-technical folks (PMs, business sponsors &c).
In particular, I've recently created a few one-off, get-it-...
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4
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Prepare source code handover plan [closed]
Our company is about to acquire a source code of a huge product.
What are thing to take into consideration when the handover starts, to make sure we have everything and be capable to maintain that ...
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