Maintenance: Make it Right!

When faced with doing program maintenance, my personal philosophy is to try to leave the code a little better than I found it.

This goes beyond merely making the requested changes. Maintenance is a good time to beef up the program comments, untangle twisted logic (be careful with that one!) and change cryptic paragraph and variable names.

And, most importantly, take the time to review the error and exception handling. If inadequate, don't just ignore it and move on, make it right!*

A wise man once said to me: "Don't tell me how it works, tell me how it fails."


* Apologies to Mike Holmes