Ruby Best Practices

Chapter 8. Skillful Project Maintenance

If you have done any significant amount of software development, you’ll know that maintaining other people’s code can be a nightmare. You may have noticed that even maintaining your own code can quickly become hellish if you are away from a project for more than a few months. On the surface, it may seem that any project that is not actively being worked on by its original developers is doomed to stagnate.

There are ways to fight back against software rot, many of which have little to do with the quality of the code itself. Instead, by following some conventions as to how you structure your project, you can make it easier to navigate. By using lightweight tools, you can simplify automatic generation of API documentation, manage dependencies and custom-built software packages, and automate your software build process in a number of ways.

When you combine the project management utilities Ruby provides (RDoc, RubyGems, Rake, etc.) with some basic guidelines for how to lay things out, you end up with a powerful advantage. Rather than working around countless inconsistencies in overall project organization, you can reuse your knowledge from working on other projects to approach new codebases. Nowhere is this more valuable than in open source software, in which contributors may need to patch code that they have never worked with before.

For this reason, we’re going to kick off this chapter with a look at the benefits that standards can offer us, through ...