Building Maintainable Software

Have you ever felt frustrated working with someone else’s code? Difficult-to-maintain source code is a big problem in software development today, leading to costly delays and defects. Be part of the solution. With this practical book, you’ll learn 10 easy-to-follow guidelines for delivering C# software that’s easy to maintain and adapt. These guidelines have been derived from analyzing hundreds of real-world systems.

Written by consultants from the Software Improvement Group (SIG), this book provides clear and concise explanations, with advice for turning the guidelines into practice. Examples for this edition are written in C#, while our companion Java book provides clear examples in that language.

• Write short units of code: limit the length of methods and constructors
• Write simple units of code: limit the number of branch points per method
• Write code once, rather than risk copying buggy code
• Keep unit interfaces small by extracting parameters into objects
• Separate concerns to avoid building large classes
• Couple architecture components loosely
• Balance the number and size of top-level components in your code
• Keep your codebase as small as possible
• Automate tests for your codebase
• Write clean code, avoiding “code smells” that indicate deeper problems

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Introduction

Chapter 2. Write Short Units of Code

Chapter 3. Write Simple Units of Code

Chapter 4. Write Code Once

Chapter 5. Keep Unit Interfaces Small

Chapter 6. Separate Concerns in Modules

Chapter 7. Couple Architecture Components Loosely

Chapter 8. Keep Architecture Components Balanced

Chapter 9. Keep Your Codebase Small

Chapter 10. Automate Tests

Chapter 11. Write Clean Code

Chapter 12. Next Steps

Appendix A. How SIG Measures Maintainability

About the Author

Joost Visser is Head of Research at the Software Improvement Group. In this role, he is responsible for the science behind the methods and tools that SIG offers to measure and master software. Joost also holds a position as professor of Large Scale Software Systems at Radboud University Nijmegen. He has obtained his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Amsterdam and has published over 100 papers on topics such as generic programming, program transformation, green computing, software quality, and software evolution. Joost considers software engineering as a sociotechnical discipline and he is convinced that software measurement is essential for development teams and product owners to thrive.