The Rules for Writing Maintainable Code

We’ve all been burned working with software code that, if not designed for long-term maintainability, results in expensive support over a product’s lifetime. Kaushal explores three approaches that provide guidelines to ensure that software is designed with maintainability in mind. If you’re a software developer, read this!

When a developer writes code, he imagines that he will be the only one working on it in the future. But the reality is that someone else will have to work on it. This may be due to a number of reasons: New functionality may be required, changes will be needed for existing features, and fixes for defects will need attention. The latter is a certainty. All of this work is often performed long after the original code was written and by a developer who did not write it. The challenge is to make changes without breaking the existing code. This situation can be complicated by the fact that there may be little technical documentation summarizing what the code actually does, and any future work will typically have tight schedule demands.