SamLR.com

Types of maintenance

Posted: 3th November 2016

A recent thought I've had, which I've not seen discussed elsewhere (feel free to link me my wrongness), is that we may not always be clear about what we mean when we claim maintainability is a design goal. I'm not sure I have much to add to the store of tools for actually tackling this but, maybe, I can add to the store of tools for thinking about it.

As it stands I consider there to be the three types of maintenance:

  • Repair
  • Short term extension
  • Long term extension

Repair is fairly obvious (fix the bugs) and extension is what I think we often mean when we talk about maintainability: add a button, implement a feature, change a widget.

I've split extension in two as I would say that we generally have very different intentions over the short and long term when designing for maintainability. In the short term we want to add our planned features, in the long term we want to refine or completely change them, regardless the long term changes we want to make are those we haven't planned for.

Aside: this feels like it mirrors Donald Rumsfeld's famous "known knowns" (what we have), "known unknowns" (what we want to add) and "unknown unknowns" (the changes we don't anticipate).

I think the core tension between short and long term extension lies in fragility. A common trap seems to be the complex solution which makes it easy to do the tasks you have in front of you and ties you up in endless knots when you come back to it.

I'm not sure there's an obvious solution to this tension other than to try and make things as simple as they can be and documented well but this may also be something I re-visit. I'm going to be moving into my first large team soon so it will be interesting to how that affects my views on this.