What lessons can you learn from software maintanence?

Posted by Vasil Remeniuk on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Vasil Remeniuk
Published on 2010-06-10T09:07:30Z Indexed on 2010/06/10 9:13 UTC
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best-practices

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subjective

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Maintenance

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lessons-learned

Hello everyone,

In the perfect world, all the software developers would work with the cutting edge technologies, creating systems from the scratch. In the real life, almost all of us have to maintain software from time to time (unlucky ones do it on a regular basis).

Personally I first 2 years of my career was fixing bugs in the company that no longer exists (it has been taken up by Oracle). And probably the biggest lesson I've learned that time - despite of the pressure, always try to get as much information about the domain as possible (even if it's irrelevant to fixing a specific bug or adding a feature) - abstract domain knowledge doesn't lose value as fast as knowledge about trendy frameworks or methodologies.

What lessons have you learned from maintenance?

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