Xref: utzoo comp.sw.components:339 comp.software-eng:2168
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!pantor!richard
From: richard@pantor.UUCP (Richard Sargent)
Newsgroups: comp.sw.components,comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: Schedule and budget are secondary
Message-ID: <25.UUL1.3#5109@pantor.UUCP>
Date: 13 Oct 89 15:30:10 GMT
References: <3807@rtech.rtech.com>
Organization: Pansophic Systems Inc, Graphics Product Company
Lines: 26

> From: linda@rtech.rtech.com (Linda Mundy)
> Message-ID: <3807@rtech.rtech.com>
> Date: 11 Oct 89 22:49:07 GMT
...
>                             Not picking you in particular, but this is
> such a common attitude towards maintenance programmers, I thought it might be
> appropriate as a topic of discussion in its own right.  
> 
Most companies I have encountered have the attitude that it takes a
particularly *skilled* person to be a *successful* maintenance programmer.

Think about it for a few moments: when you come along, pick up some else's
code, have to find and fix a bug in the shortest possible time frame (since
it is delaying your customers!), and so on. Good maint.programmers are
worth their weight in gold (well, maybe silver :-) to companies which have
a significant investment in existing products.

In an ideal world, it would be nice if we developers didn't create
programs with any bugs, so maint.programmers would only have to deal
with enhancement requests, but it just ain't that way now, and won't
be for quite some time to come. :-(



Richard Sargent                   Internet: richard@pantor.UUCP
Systems Analyst                   UUCP:     uunet!pantor!richard