Is code maintenance typically a special project, or is it considered part of daily work?

Posted by blueberryfields on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by blueberryfields
Published on 2011-02-03T22:11:40Z Indexed on 2011/02/03 23:34 UTC
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code-quality

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code-smell

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clean-code

Earlier, I asked to find out which tools are commonly used to monitor methods and code bases, to find out whether the methods have been getting too long.

Most of the responses there suggested that, beyond maintenance on the method currently being edited, programmers don't, in general, keep an eye on the rest of the code base.

So I thought I'd ask the question in general:

Is code maintenance, in general, considered part of your daily work? Do you find that you're spending at least some of your time cleaning up, refactoring, rewriting code in the code base, to improve it, as part of your other assigned work? Is it expected of you/do you expect it of your teammates? Or is it more common to find that cleanup, refactoring, and general maintenance on the codebase as a whole, occurs in bursts (for example, mostly as part of code reviews, or as part of refactoring/cleaning up projects)?

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