Design – Build – Run: Applied Practices and Principles for Production-Ready Software Development

Chapter 22. Designing for Application Maintenance

This chapter examines some of the practices you can employ to ensure that your systems are maintainable. You've seen that application maintenance is not just about live service support and maintenance. During the development and fix activities you are acting as part of an application maintenance team and need to ensure that you can make updates without too much trouble. Application maintenance and development are very closely related. I thought I'd take a different approach for this chapter and actually walk through parts of the development environment. The examples in this chapter are based on Visual Studio 2008, although the practices can and should be applied to any tools and technologies.

Starting out with the right approach will help to ensure that the project continues in a consistent and manageable way. Every developer needs to ensure that what they are doing conforms to the overall approach that's been decided.

This chapter is organized into the following sections:

• Preparing the Solution — Examines how to prepare the solution folder structure, the individual projects, and the code profiler settings that you should have switched on right from the very start of development.

• Defining the Standards — Examines some of the best practice standards and guidelines, including XML comments and general commenting and coding standards.

• Supporting Configurability — Examines a few areas where you can make the application easier to maintain ...