Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!timbuk!cs.umn.edu!kksys!wd0gol!newave!john
From: john@newave.UUCP (John A. Weeks III)
Newsgroups: comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: Code inspections for "mature" code?
Message-ID: <624@newave.UUCP>
Date: 1 Feb 91 04:10:05 GMT
References: <1991Jan30.175221.25595@cbnewsl.att.com>
Reply-To: john@newave.mn.org (John A. Weeks III)
Organization: NeWave Communications Ltd, Eden Prairie, MN
Lines: 29

In article <1991Jan30.175221.25595@cbnewsl.att.com> psrc@cbnewsl.att.com (Paul S. R. Chisholm) writes:
> Our biggest problem is that we had (depending on how much of the
> product we wanted to inspect) between 15K and 50K non-commentary source
> lines (NCSLs) of C code.  All of it had been written in a hurry, the
> original authors were not available to provide much help, and only one
> team member knew non-trivial portions of the code at all.  Many of the
> functions were very long (the worst offender was a single function with
> more than a thousand statements!)

How did you get ahold of my current project???  If you are good at this,
would you like a job?  (just kidding...)  Are there variable names like
c, cc, and ccc?

> I can see how inspection works for new, highly modular code.  How does
> it work when your maintaining dinosaurs?  ("Rewrite the dinosaur" is
> not a solution I could have gotten past management.)

Kill them.  One of my clients has spent more than three times the original
development cost on maintainence of a specialized statistics program that
was poorly developed.  Its funny how professional managers can never
understand this type of economics.

-john-

-- 
===============================================================================
John A. Weeks III               (612) 942-6969               john@newave.mn.org
NeWave Communications                 ...uunet!rosevax!tcnet!wd0gol!newave!john
===============================================================================