Software Rot
When you’re green, you’re growing. When you’re ripe, you rot.
Bad things happen to good code. No matter how well you start, no matter how honorable your intentions, no matter how pure your design and how clean the first release’s implementation, time will warp and twist your masterpiece. Never underestimate the ability of code to acquire warts and blemishes during its life.
There is a misconception that software only develops during its initial stages of life. The maintenance phase of software development[1] is always the longest. It’s where most of the overall effort goes—even if this effort is not scrunched into a compact ball, like the initial design and development work. B.W. Boehm, a respected computer science professor, ...
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