Does software rot refer primarily to performance, or to messy code?
- by Kazark
Wikipedia's definition of software rot focuses on the performance of the software. This is a different usage than I am used to; I had thought of it much more in terms of the cleanliness and design of the code—in terms of the code's having all the standard quality characteristics: readability, maintainability, etc. Now, performance is likely to go down when the code becomes unreadable, because no one knows what is going on. But does the term software rot have special reference to performance? or am I right in thinking it refers to the cleanliness of the code? or is this perhaps a case of multiple senses of the term being in common usage—from the user's perspective, it has do with performance; but for the software craftsman, it has to do more specifically with how the code reads?
