Surprising? Not if you consider how easily people can spray low-value unit tests at an existing codebase. (Though the absence of any automated testing generally correlates with low maintainability). I don’t, personally, find any of these metrics highly predictive of maintainable codebases. People tend to look for the presence of unit tests or the number of unit tests at first, and then mature to look for unit test coverage. And yet, so often we miss the mark with interim valuations. That notion is up there with death and taxes among life’s inevitabilities. You had to see this coming, so I’ll get it out of the way right off the bat. Some of them may seem a bit off the beaten path. Here are some characteristics in the field that I use when assessing this property. Maintainable codebases mean easy, fast, risk-free, and cheap change. But it also includes concerns like deployment effort, defect cycle time, the universality of skills required, and plenty more. Yes, that money includes developer labor. From the perspective of those paying the bills, maintainable code doesn’t mean “code developers like to work with” but rather “code that minimizes spend for future changes.” On top of that, I frequently find myself explaining concepts like the cost of code ownership, and regarding code as, for lack of a better term, inventory. In my travels as a consultant, I have seen so many codebases that it sometimes seems I’m watching a flip book show of code. What are the secrets to maintainable codebases? What properties do they have, and what can you do to create these properties? Rather than discuss the code per se, I want to discuss the codebase as a whole. So today, I’d like to take a different tack in talking about maintainable code. And I present no exception I have little doubt that you could find posts about this on my own blog. As you can see, software developers frequently offer opinions on this particular topic. If you take to the Internet, you won’t need to venture far to find essays, lists, and stack exchange questions on the subject. So, I’m sure, when you heard this, you didn’t react effusively with, “oh, good idea - thanks!” The admonishment is as obligatory as it is vague. I assume people have told you this at some point.
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