{"id":628,"date":"2021-03-12T07:50:42","date_gmt":"2021-03-12T07:50:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/metrics.blogg.gu.se\/?p=628"},"modified":"2021-02-24T13:54:47","modified_gmt":"2021-02-24T13:54:47","slug":"what-makes-a-great-code-maintainer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/metrics.blogg.gu.se\/?p=628","title":{"rendered":"What makes a great code maintainer\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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BIld av Rudy and Peter Skitterians<\/a> fr\u00e5n Pixabay<\/a>



ICSE2021_B.pdf (igor.pro.br)<\/a> <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

For many of us,\nsoftware engineering is the possibility to create new projects, new products\nand cool services. We do that often, but we equally often forget about the\nmaintenance. Well, maybe not forget, but we deliverately do not want to\nremember about it. It’s natural, as maintaining old code is not really anything\ninteresting. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When reading this\npaper, I’ve realized that my view about the maintenance is a bit old. In my\ntime in industry, maintainance was “bug-fixing” mostly. Today, this\nis more about community work. As the abstract of this paper says:\n“Although Open Source Software (OSS) maintainers devote a significant\nproportion of their work to coding tasks, great maintainers must excel in many\nother activities beyond coding. Maintainers should care about fostering a\ncommunity, helping new members to find their place, while also saying \u201cno\u201d to\npatches that although are well-coded and well-tested, do not contribute to the\ngoal of the project.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This paper conducts\na series of interviews with software maintainers. In short, their results are\nthat great software maintainers are:<\/p>\n\n\n\n