Questions tagged [maintenance]
The activities that occur after deployment of a software system. This includes making modifications to released systems, training, operating, and transitioning to support organizations.
209 questions
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Best thing to do by private developers in case of impending death or plans to cease development on a personal private project
Suppose I have a personal private code project.
What should the developer do with the code in case of impending death or plans to cease development on their personal private project.
Suppose, they do ...
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3
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173
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According to Swanson's maintenance activities, what category does paying down Technical Debt in a Software fall into?
I am trying to understand the categories of maintenance activities described by E.B. Swanson, i.e., Perfective, Adaptive, and Corrective; which category does paying down Technical Debt (TD) fall into? ...
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5
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442
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Can we use Git as an additional tool to better estimate maintenance effort?
I'm working with a codebase that is almost 4y old, just a little under 2000 source files and roughly 100 developers have committed to it.
One of our third-party dependencies is not actively maintained ...
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1
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236
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How to maintain well structured code and latency optimized code together?
I'm working on a c++ data analysis project. My workflow goes like this
Analyze the data and build models
Optimize the code for latency, to deploy for production
goto 1
Step 1 has lots of machine ...
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3
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921
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using git, bringing old tagged releases up to date
I have a git repository with a long history. Releases were tagged along the master branch over time.
If a user wants to go back and check out an old tagged release, they do not have the advantage of ...
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1
answer
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Code Base Analysis
Does anyone know of a methodology that can be used on a project file tree to identify dead files, dead code, unused libraries, etc. I have been thinking about this for some time as I seem to inherit ...
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2
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230
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How to prioritize maintenance work and tech tebt with something like User Pain?
User Pain is an established concept to prioritize bugs in a consistent way that is stable over time by calculating a single score based on a small number of criteria.
https://lostgarden.home.blog/...
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4
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152
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More maintainable way for handing a variable XML
The data of my application is retrieved from an XML file. XML file is versioned, but there is a new XML version file very often. The structure of each XML file changes with respect to the other ...
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130
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Change Requests Billing
I have a website developed for my client, and he's currently on an annual maintenance billing for the same post development pushed to production, that he'd paid me for the development charges ...
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1
answer
170
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Managing Multiple Applications With Similar Configuration Files
From the .Net perspective (C#, VB, etc.) and MSSQL, I have noticed that for a set of applications (maintained by the same development team) typically have the same defined configuration for connecting ...
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2
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361
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How to maintain a project documentation?
How is it done in practice to maintain a project documentation but not the documentation to the users but the doc for the maintainers. For example, is it customary to just look at the files and ...
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Effective method of estimation when dealing with large code bases
Got a largish legacy Java code base at my hands:
~100k LoC
~1100 classes
monolithic and cohesive (no "modules" or so)
many OOP abstraction layers
almost no comments, etc.
The task is to produce time ...
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2k
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How to review sql changes more effectively? [duplicate]
From my experience, sql code changes almost always tend to be NOT incremental: someone creates a new stored procedure, or modifies an entire embedded sql query for optimization purposes, or creates a ...
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4
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204
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Struggling vs A Clean rewrite vs extending by overwriting virtual functions
I'm constantly supporting a specialized downloader I wrote 5 years ago! It has to login and download from more then 40 sites. I have kept changing the code over and over as I encountered new sites or ...
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329
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How should support/bugfixes work in a larger organisation?
We have a team of about 40 engineers who work on a large SaaS platform. As with any organisation, we have an enormous backlog of things we want to deliver from our roadmap. But of course, we also have ...
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Upgrading outdated node.js with many dependencies, should it be done incrementally?
If one wishes to upgrade from Node 0.10.48 all the way to the latest LTS version (8.11.2 as of right now) would it be smart to upgrade only to version 0.12.18 first, and then to 4.9.1 and so on?
The ...
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Moving 10pm scheduled maintenance date, big deal or not?
The company I work for notifies its (90%+ non-profit) customers ahead of time that there may be a brief outage at 10pm and that their customer websites' ability to edit will be suspended for maybe an ...
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Is code being constantly rewritten and is it therefore pointless to worry about the quality of the early iterations of rewriting code?
In the University one of the lecturers was insisting on a piece of advice I found odd.
This lecturer insisted that his pupils do not care too much about decisions like the choice of the programming ...
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117
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Can we break CQS to get some DRY?
In our codebase we have a lot of controllers with a very similar structure:
@my_model.update_owner(something)
if @my_model.update_attributes(params)
return render_object(@my_model)
else
...
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3
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1k
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Legacy code: what to do in regards to maintenance and moving forward? [duplicate]
I am currently working on an application with legacy code that was built using proof of concepts (POCs). These POCs became the finished production-ready code, there were no tests, and the classes have ...
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How do you cost in maintenance / updates?
I'm interested in how companies cost in the maintenance of software and or improvement of code quality over time.
The context I would like to add, is not that of a company who have a single product ...
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1
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321
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What are best practices to maintain a list in the database in Rails?
I have list boxes and model relationships in the database. I'm doing the following migrations to maintain lists, rename items, and add items:
def up
Fund.create min: 0, max: 1_000_000
...
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3
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378
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how to protect against theft of a class. (neural network class) [duplicate]
I am writing software that makes use of a neural net.
What makes my network special as compared to others, is the way I train them.
Its non standard, its something that I don't want to give away to ...
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3
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594
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How to safely shutdown API server?
We have an API server, which serves both of our web app and mobile app (both Android, IOS).
We have to shut down database servers sometimes for up-gradation or maintenance, so the site shows ...
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1
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866
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How do I structure and maintain a large ASP.Net Core C# Application once it is in Production?
Having used a lot of scripting languages, it's pretty simple to make a change. No compilation necessary.
But now I have an ASP.Net C# application. It's small, so I can learn from it, but how do I ...
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5
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Should older code be updated to use newer language constructs, or should outdated constructs be stuck with?
I want to make some enhancements in some still-functional code that was written a long time ago, before the programming language it is written in grew in features. In theory, the whole project uses ...
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2
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1k
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How to maintain database script for continuous delivery?
We are working on one legacy framework and it is continuously evolving.
Problem 1 : If somebody want to run the application with latest code then he/she spend lots of time in doing so (like somebody ...
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2
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131
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How to create database, tables and stored procedures during installation of application
Our company code base still has some code that will create the database, tables, stored procedures and the like.Coding the SQL stored procedures line by line in Java, in string format is a real pain.
...
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Should I refactor this database? How can I do it?
Firstly, some context.
I'm working in a project with more than 10 years of development and without any documentation. My task now is to create a comprehensive documentation for the database (it is a ...
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128
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Overtake the maintenance of a software package
Recently I am using a software package which seems pretty useful, but which I don't understand how it works internally.
This package contains software generated by several PhD students and lecturers ...
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4
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509
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Bug clustering in source code
There are many claims about existence of clusters of bugs or defects. A simple search reveals multiple results, for example:
1,
2,
3,
4,
5.
However, all the evidence cited is anecdotal and I could ...
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Is there any commonly accepted guidelines about how to write modern C?
I have a strong Java/Groovy background and I've been assigned to a team that maintain quite a big C code base for an administrative software.
Some pain points, like dealing with blob in the database ...
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2
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728
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Is maintenance, feedback, or support an integral phase of SDLC?
What makes SDLC a "lifecycle" in the first place?
Let's say that a software vendor signed up a contract with a customer who does not require their software to maintained or supported by the vendor. ...
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4
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1
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2k
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Maintain two different versions of similar code [duplicate]
I'm working on a special project where I need to create a new application with a similar but restricted functionality of an original application (basically a type of free application with limited ...
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1
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695
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How to go about upgrading spaghetti code? Is it worth it? [duplicate]
I'm working on medium sized ASP.NET MVC 4 web app, that is about 2.5 years old. Around 25-30k lines of code. The project has never followed any of the good .NET design practices. It is a very tightly ...
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take over an existing (partially finished) Android project [duplicate]
I've been asked to takeover an existing Android project and the developer who was previously working on this project has left many things incomplete and un-solved with some really bad code ...
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9
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Is it normal/acceptable to write down notes, thoughts, algorithms, decisions during coding and maintenance? [closed]
Some people have this problem that they cannot think without words. And writing down their thoughts and decisions is the most effective way to proceed.
So - is it normal and acceptable that I write ...
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2
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2
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16k
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Mapping enum values into regexes
I'm doing some code cleanup and I'm looking at my regexes. I have an extremely simple one:
(ARA|CHI|FRE|GER|ITA|JPN|RUS|SPA)\s[0-9]{3}-[0-9]{2}
It basically validates course identifiers for a ...
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6
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Thousands of errors!
I was assigned to a new project recently. Well, an old project actually, written in classic ASP. Now a new version of the application is being written in the latest ASP.NET, but it's not expected to ...
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1
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1k
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Recently moved from Java to JavaScript on Node.js, how to maintain code?
I recently moved from Java to JavaScript on Node.js. I was very excited, opened up my IntelliJ IDE for an existing Node.js project only to find I cannot know what the parameters I see functions ...
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0
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177
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Are there downsides to writing PDO/mysqli statements into my code directly vs using my own redirect wrapper methods?
TL;DR: To access DB functionality in my codebase I currently use a custom layer throughout the code. The layer needs an upgrade in order to begin accepting prepared statements, which it currently ...
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Easily accessible setup files for installation
The software product I work on has several services and user interfaces. There are separate setup files for each unit of the product for installation. We make customer specific changes and bug fixes ...
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Git branching strategy for long-running unreleased code
At our team, in addition to individual units of work (Stories), we have longer-running themes of work (Epics). Multiple stories make an epic.
Traditionally we've had feature branches for each Story, ...
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When rewriting medium to large applications, which of these approaches are useful?
Despite Joel's missive that software rewrites are to be avoided under pain of death, it is still fairly common place. A lot of the existing software is good, but here and there, parts of it niggle, so ...
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Is it an overkill to write unit tests for a small code base? [duplicate]
I am the sole maintainer of a code base of about 2000 lines of code. It's not big, but over time the code became so unmaintainable my boss agreed to give me time to rewrite it from scratch.
Since the ...
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6
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350
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Class design, responsibility granulation, efficiency and performance
I am in a design dilemma. I have a set of data that can be interpreted in numerous ways, but I cannot really decide how finely grained should it be. To illustrate it with some simple code:
class Base ...
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1
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219
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Should I put stack trace in error files and halt my app with user friendly error [closed]
In my earlier project I wrote an app that is used in-house. My usual practice is to capture errors/exceptions from different classes and threads and put them in different log files corresponding to ...
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115
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Do I need to estimate maintenance software issues? [closed]
The PM of the company I work on, always asks me to estimate maintenance issues and since there are several legacy systems that I didn't build, makes this hard to get.
He says getting estimations for ...
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How to make 100k lines of orphan code work [duplicate]
I've recently started to work on an old project, that was originally written by two professors with no programming experience. Those professors left the project before they have finished it. Meaning ...
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What factors should influence how I determine when to abandon a small project with a friend? [closed]
I've found myself in a tough spot as of late. Been working on a game with a programming buddy for nearly 8 months now. We both started off as newcomers to programming around August of last year, he is ...
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