Open Discussion Thread for "Syndromes of Forgotten Programmers," by Kevin Cauble
This is an open discussion and comments thread for the article published in developer.* Magazine, "Syndromes of Forgotten Programmers," by Kevin Cauble. If you haven't already, you can read it here, then add your comments below. If the discussion hasn't already started, no need to fear posting first!
This dicussion page is hosted in the developer.* Coopertive Digest.
Software Reengineering
"Count me in favor of adding a course in software maintenance to Computer Science curriculums."
As a matter of fact these type of courses exist today at universities.
One i know of is the university of Antwerp teaching "software reengineering", they have a research group: Lab on Object-oriented Reengineering (LORE) lead by prof Serge Demeyer, author of the book: Object-Oriented Reengineering Patterns.
Someday i will write on this topic on my blog http://software-quality.blogspot.com
Enjoy,
Ronny
Garbage Collectors and Railroad Engineers
Man, I have known some Garbage Collectors in my time. This has to be one of my pet peeves--especially when source code control is in use. If we don't need that code any more, by all means, please go ahead and delete it. That's what version control is for.
No fun at all inheriting a module littered with commented code--particularly when you've got a strange ghost-in-the-machine bug you're trying to track down. Why was that line right there commented out? When was it commented out? Who commented it out? Could that be a cause in this bug? Love that. :-)
I have known a lot of Railroad Engineers. A Railroad Engineer on a maintenance team can be deadly, particularly in the long term. Railroad Engineer tendencies can arise in high-pressure environments where there is a lot of emphasis on fixing defects as quickly as possible. There's no time to ask deeper questions or get to root causes, so you just throw in a new switch. Error goes away, defect closed, pointy headed boss happy.
Dan