Re: A Trend Towards Lower Software Maintenance Budgets?

In article <buvmv4x2v9.ln2@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Flash Gordon <spam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Sometimes code needs to be scrapped and
rewritten, sometimes it needs to be modified. This applies at all scales
(yes, I've been involved in scrapping and rewriting what after the
rewrite was about 50000 LOC). So blanket advice to scrap and rewrite is
bad advice just as blanket advice to always modify what you have is bad.

Our particular development cycle usually involves writing something
in a prototyping language (e.g., MATLAB, maple, Mathematica, IDL)
and hacking on it endlessly for a few years, changing our mind about
what it is supposed to do several times a day. This is the exploratory
research phase, where we often do not know if something is possible
and we often do not know if we have reached the "right" answer.
The sort of code where a bug might happen to produce a better answer
than what we thought we were coding, leaving us to scratch our heads
and re-re-analyze to improve our techniques. Naturally, with so many
changes in purpose and technique going on, the end result is often
a coding mess.

Once we have figured out what works (and what doesn't) and have
a functional implementation, it's time to hand it over to another
group that extracts the good parts and rewrites them cleanly and
efficiently in C++ or C as part of our integrated research framework.

It would not be unfair to say that at that point we are throwing
out several 10's of kLOC and several person-years of coding, to be
rewritten into a completely different form. This isn't a waste of
time: it is the point that seperates the "Research" from the
"Development".
--
So you found your solution
What will be your last contribution?
-- Supertramp (Fool's Overture)
.

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