Software maintenance
From WhyNotWiki
Gerald M. Weinberg (2007-03-12). Innocent but Dangerous Language (http://secretsofconsulting.blogspot.com/2007/03/innocent-but-dangerous-language.html).
A janitor can assume that changing one washer in the kitchen sink won’t incur great risk of causing the building to collapse and bury all the occupants. It’s not safe to make the same assumption for a program used every day to run a business, but because we are so free and arbitrary with words, the word “maintenance” has been misappropriated from the one circumstance to the other.Whoever coined the word “maintenance” for computer programs was as careless and unthinking as the person who trains an attack dog to kill on the command KILL or HELLO. With the wisdom of hindsight, I would suggest that the “maintenance” programmer is more like a brain surgeon than a janitor—because opening up a working system is more like opening up a human brain and replacing a nerve than opening up a sink and replacing a washer. Would maintenance be easier to manage if it were called “software brain surgery”?
| “ | ... the “maintenance” programmer is more like a brain surgeon than a janitor—because opening up a working system is more like opening up a human brain and replacing an nerve ... | ” |
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—Gerald M. Weinberg |
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