Although simplistic, every programming decision I make is largely based on maintainability. Maintainability is the cornerstone of enterprise development. Frequent CodeBetter readers are likely sick of hearing about it, but there's a good reason we talk about maintainability so often – it’s the key to being a great software developer. I can think of a couple reasons why it’s such an important design factor. First, both studies and firsthand experience tell us that systems spend a considerable amount of time (over 50%) in a maintenance state - be it changes, bug fixes or support. Second, the growing adoption of iterative development means that changes and features are continuously made to existing code (and even if you haven’t adopted iterative development such as Agile, your clients are likely still asking you to make all types of changes.) In short, a maintainable solution not only reduces your cost, but also increases the number and quality of features you’ll be able to deliver.
Even if you're relatively new to programming, there's a good chance you've already started forming opinions about what is and isn't maintainable from your experience working with others, taking over someone's application, or even trying to fix something you wrote a couple months ago. One of the most important things you can do is consciously take note when something doesn’t seem quite right and google around for better solutions. For example, those of us who spent years programming in classicASP knew that the tight integration between code and HTML wasn't ideal.
Creating maintainable code isn’t the most trivial thing. As you get started, you’ll need to be extra diligent until things start to become more natural. As you might have suspected, we aren’t the firsts to put some thought into creating maintainable code. To this end, there are some sound ideologies you ought to familiarize yourself with. As we go through them, take time to consider each one in depth, google them for extra background and insight, and, most importantly, try to see how they might apply to a recent project you worked on.
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