system quality aspect characterizing the ease of software maintenance
-3
votes
0answers
25 views
How do you tidy up and maintain your code in JavaScript (jQuery)? [duplicate]
How do you tidy up and maintain your code in JavaScript (jQuery) while keeping it simple?
I've been wanting to ask this for a while now but I never get around to it so I usually use websites like ...
1
vote
0answers
62 views
Environment that enables variable constraint checking and
Currently I'm working on a system that enables users to add Tag's to available TagTypes on specific pages. For instance, we would have a TagType called "Installer" and the user wants his name ...
3
votes
1answer
196 views
How reduce the usage of Magic Strings?
In the application database there is a configuration table with this schema:
Table: ReleaseProperty
ReleasePropertyID
ReleaseID
Name
Value
Currently to retrieve a specific property I pass to the ...
-1
votes
5answers
265 views
Isn't striving for elegance counter-productive? [closed]
Many questions have been asked about the nature of elegant code and design, but the underlying assumption seems to be that elegance is a good thing. Therefore it is acceptable or even desirable to ...
25
votes
9answers
2k views
Is template “metaprogramming” in Java a good idea?
There is a source file in a rather large project with several functions that are extremely performance-sensitive (called millions of times per second). In fact, the previous maintainer decided to ...
4
votes
2answers
218 views
Can decoupling hurt maintainability in certain situations?
Can the fact that the business logic is mapped to interfaces instead of implementations actually hinder the maintenance of the application in certain situations?
A naive example with the Java's ...
8
votes
1answer
410 views
Refactoring a 1500 LOC method that only builds the graphical UI [closed]
I'm currently scratching my head over how to refactor a method that basically only builds the UI.
The method is more than 1500 lines of code (LOC) long - and counting. It has grown, there was no plan ...
1
vote
4answers
189 views
Is there a good way to communicate the intent that a class only contains referentially transparent methods?
My workplace mostly uses C# for writing code. I'm trying to figure out a good way to indicate that a class with referentially transparent methods is intended to be referentially transparent (i.e., ...
17
votes
4answers
592 views
What should plugins use: hooks, events or something else?
Consider an app that allows plugins to react to its program flow.
I know 2 ways to achieve this: hooks and events
1. Hooks
Use calls to empty functions inside the main program flow. These functions ...
0
votes
1answer
83 views
Persisting type in Java - should I be using flags?
Is there some specific piece of advice around persist values that indicate type? Specifically I want to know if I should persist a flag/state indicating the type in persistence or not. I get the ...
1
vote
1answer
357 views
Splitting and hiding headers in a static library
I am writing a static library for C/C++ (personal project). As my headers became rather large, I thought that splitting my headers would be a good idea.
Right now a header looks like this:
...
17
votes
5answers
1k views
Fighting technical debt as the “lowest developer”?
Let's say you work for a company and what you do is develop software for them. You have no idea of the big picture or maybe slight. What you do have are tasks assigned to you via issue tracking ...
1
vote
3answers
149 views
Should one create underlying architecture to increase flexibility - in advance or when needed? [closed]
In this question I asked: Is the cost of designing more levels of abstraction to allow loose coupling worth the benefits, or not?
People said that it's often worth the cost, but one should sense ...
1
vote
3answers
91 views
How maintainable are automated refactorings? [closed]
Resharper offered to turn my loop:
foreach (JObject obj in arr)
{
var id = (string)obj["Id"];
var accountId = (double)obj["AccountId"];
var departmentName = (string)obj["DeptName"];
...
5
votes
7answers
396 views
Scrum decision making versus maintainability and development time? [closed]
I appreciate that this question may be controversial. In a sense, it is the flip-side of the question "Business trying to make technical decisions".
In Scrum, the development team is supposed to be ...
4
votes
3answers
275 views
How to avoid unmaintainable code when using SQL in an MVC setting?
I want to present a list of products to the user. This list is paginated and can be sorted by the user by product ID or product name in ascending or descending order.
I am using an MVC setting, where ...
3
votes
1answer
480 views
Am I right to be skeptical of ASP.NET MVC “Html Helpers”? [closed]
ASP.NET WebForms seemed really great until that moment of realization the abstraction you'd welcomed was producing HTML that was worlds away from what you needed. Wrestling with that framework to ...
1
vote
1answer
374 views
Readability vs benefits of polymorphism
We are dealing with a lot of CRUD operations in our application. Each database table has one or more corresponding SQLContainer instances to perform various types of operations. All of these ...
1
vote
3answers
267 views
Ways of developing for small system. What is expedient?
I'm developing a small system for internal automation. I use asp.net webforms and faced with a choice:
develop a system architecture in an object-oriented style (development becomes more difficult ...
0
votes
4answers
763 views
Usage of magic strings/numbers [closed]
This is somewhat controversial topic, and I guess there is as many opinions as there are programmers. But for the sake of it, I want to know what are the common practices in business (or in your work ...
3
votes
6answers
396 views
Which is the most practical way to add functionality to this piece of code?
I'm writing an open source library which handles hexagonal grids. It mainly revolves around the HexagonalGrid and the Hexagon class. There is a HexagonalGridBuilder class which builds the grid which ...
4
votes
2answers
179 views
Does the use of mongodb enhance extending/changing database driven applications?
When an application is created which need to store data, an SQL database is used very often.
So did I in a lot of asp.net applications. The resulting applications have often an ORM like the entity ...
0
votes
1answer
142 views
Implementing new required feature after software release
Fake Scenario
There is a software that was released 1 year ago. The software is to map and register all kind of animals on our planet. When the software was released, the client only needed to know ...
14
votes
3answers
381 views
Does usage of advanced language features decrease maintainability? [duplicate]
On a code review, I've stumbled on an interesting idea, which I can't properly judge alone.
Is it OK to improve readability of code by means of not widely known language syntax? When the original ...
0
votes
3answers
256 views
What's wrong with this approach to CSS?
I have a static Jekyll website.
The website is constructed once, on my computer, and then sent to the server in the form of plain HTML, image, and CSS files, to be served by a regular HTTP server.
...
4
votes
4answers
326 views
Encapsulate standard C functions?
While studying the C programming language and learning safe practices, I'm inclined to write a layer of functionality over several parts of the standard library. This would serve two purposes: I ...
2
votes
3answers
855 views
Do SAS coding “best practices” exist?
At work, we develop a lot of our applications in SAS, from start to finish. One of the problems with this approach is that SAS is a very verbose language with very few language constructs; there is ...
6
votes
4answers
260 views
What should I include in my repositiory from IDE projects
I want to add a project which in this case is created in Netbeans but this question is general for most IDE's. It's simply, what should I include in my repository. For example Netbeans creates a ...
7
votes
8answers
579 views
What can I use to keep track of the status of 60 software projects, some of which are obsolete? [closed]
I've taken a software development role in an engineering company(all software developed is for internal use only). The company has about 60 individual projects from past developers. The problem is ...
3
votes
1answer
105 views
What aspects of “maintainability” can influence choice of IS implementation technology?
Background: I'm an apprentice and am handling the project of developing a particular IS-System. Currently I'm only managing the requirements analysis and the information-processes design, but as a ...
2
votes
2answers
361 views
Prevent code from getting mess [duplicate]
I am a student and a freelance programmer. These days I am developing a software in VB6 which has recently crossed 100KB of source code.
The main problem, I face is, many times I have to refactor my ...
2
votes
2answers
248 views
How to keep my Activity code readable and maintainable?
I have written a rather small App with only one activity. From my understanding an activity has to be seen as kind of a view and controller in one class.
But even for a little app, with 3 dialogs ...
3
votes
2answers
338 views
Is there a name for being able to quickly find the relevant code? [closed]
I notice that a property of codebases that I like hacking on is that it's quick to find the relevant code for some feature, without knowing much about the code base at all. For example, searching for ...
11
votes
3answers
589 views
What to do when your colleagues don't value code maintainability [duplicate]
I've been working in the same software development department for a few years now. In that time, the average stay of a developer has been 6-9 months. A handful have been around for over 2 years, but ...
1
vote
2answers
429 views
JavaScript codes complexity and maintainability [closed]
I am trying to make my way back to JavaScript (been there last time some 7 years ago) with the help of lovely "Eloquent JavaScript" book.
While I admire author's capabilities and approach, I have ...
8
votes
1answer
317 views
Are there any empirical studies about the effects of commenting source code on software quality, maintainability and developer productivity? [closed]
I am an advocate of commenting on source code and documenting software products. It is my personal experience and observation that working on source code that is rigorously commented has helped me in ...
4
votes
2answers
855 views
Creating huge decision tree
I'm to write an event correlator. A fundamental part of the system will be a decision tree that recognizes the origin of the fault basing on recorded states and log files.
Often many accidents will ...
26
votes
11answers
2k views
Maintenance wise, is `else while` without intervening braces considered safe?
Is else while without intervening braces considered "safe" maintenance wise?
Writing if-else code without braces like below...
if (blah)
foo();
else
bar();
...carries a risk because the ...
9
votes
5answers
655 views
Which is more maintainable — boolean assignment via if/else or boolean expression?
Which would be considered more maintainable?
if (a == b) c = true; else c = false;
or
c = (a == b);
I've tried looking in Code Complete, but can't find an answer.
I think the first is more ...
29
votes
10answers
3k views
Are flag variables an absolute evil?
Are flag variables evil? Are the following kind of variables profoundly immoral and is it wicked to use them?
"boolean or integer variables that you assign a value in certain places then down ...
3
votes
6answers
561 views
Is it a bad practice to write shell script with many if-else statment and for loops?
I am maintaing several data process shell scripts which are full of if-else statements and for loops . I try to make the scritps tidy and easy to debug.
When I read some suggestions about shell code ...
8
votes
2answers
1k views
How is technical debt best measured? What metric(s) are most useful? [duplicate]
Possible Duplicate:
How can I quantify the amount of technical debt that exists in a project?
If I wanted to help a customer understand the degree of technical debt in his application, what ...
5
votes
2answers
422 views
How to have a maintainable and manageable Javascript code base [closed]
I am starting a new job soon as a frontend developer. The App I would be working on is 100% Javascript on the client side. all the server returns is an index page that loads all the Javascript files ...
8
votes
1answer
453 views
Futures/Monads vs Events
In an application framework
when performance impact can be ignored (10-20 events per second at max),
what is more maintainable and flexible to use as a preferred medium for communication between ...
2
votes
4answers
441 views
When creating a library for a simple program, what must I do to protect others from its lack of thread safety?
When creating a library for a simple program, is it more cost effective to make it thread safe or is there a way to detect the program's use in a multithreaded program and ASSERT() or otherwise ...
3
votes
2answers
353 views
Questions about identifying the components in MVC
I'm currently developing an client-server application in node.js, Express, mustache and MySQL. However, I believe this question should be mostly language and framework agnostic.
This is the first ...
1
vote
2answers
921 views
Are CK Metrics still considered useful? Is there an open source tool to help?
Chidamber & Kemerer proposed several metrics for object oriented code. Among them, depth of inheritance tree, weighted number of methods, number of member functions, number of children, and ...
7
votes
6answers
1k views
What to do when you inherit an unmaintainable codebase? [duplicate]
Possible Duplicate:
Techniques to re-factor garbage and maintain sanity?
I've inherited 200K lines of spaghetti code — what now?
I'm currently working at a company with 2 other ...
3
votes
5answers
389 views
Practices for navigating and changing “long” code files?
Many a times I have to deal with code files which are quite long - about 5 screen pages at the minimum. Almost always there is something towards the top/bottom that I need to refer when I'm at the ...
3
votes
4answers
384 views
Does it still make sense to think about effective code on micro scale in C++?
Early in my programming career I was in love with pointer twiddling, lean code, doing everything with as little layers of abstraction as possible and so on. The code was very C like I would say, close ...
