We maintain our cars, homes and devices. Heating and cooling systems need regular maintenance. So do our bodies! If we don’t care for our bodies properly, they break down! Software, by sharp contrast, never needs to be maintained. NEVER! Using the word “maintenance” to describe applying a “maintenance update” to software is beyond misleading. More accurate would be to say “a new version of the software that was crippled by a horrible design error that our perpetually broken quality processes failed to catch.” That’s not “maintenance.” It’s an urgent “factory recall” to fix a design error that infects every car (copy of the software) that was built using the flawed design.
Software is different than almost everything
Software is unlike nearly everything in our experience. It is literally invisible. Even “experts” have trouble understanding a given body of code, much less the vast continent of code it interacts with. Naturally, we apply real-world metaphors to give us a chance of understanding it. While sometimes helpful, the metaphors often prove to be seriously misleading, giving nearly everyone a deeply inaccurate view of the underlying invisible reality. The notion of “software maintenance” is a classic example. The flaw is similar to the words “software factory.”
Maintaining anything physical centers around either preventing or repairing things that break due to simple wear-and-tear or an adverse event. We change the oil in a car because it degrades with use. We change the filters in heating and cooling units because they get clogged up with the gunk from the air that passes through them. We sharpen knives that have dulled as a result of use. We maintain our homes and yards. It’s the physical world and things happen.
In the invisible, non-physical world of software, by contrast, a body of software is the same after years of use as it was the moment it was created. Nothing gets worn down. Nothing gets clogged. An inspection after years of heavy use would show that every single bit, every one and zero, was the same as it was when it was created. Of course there are memory crashes, hacker changes, etc. It’s not that software is impervious to being changed; it’s just that software is unchanged as a result of being used – unlike everything in the normal physical world, which one way or another, is changed by its environment – everything from clothes getting wrinkled or dirty from wear to seats being worn down by being sat upon.
The meaning of software maintenance
When a car is proven to have a design flaw, auto manufacturers are reluctant to ship everyone a new car in which the original design flaw has been corrected. Instead, they issue a recall notice to each affected owner, urging them to bring their car to the nearest dealership to have repair done to the car that corrects the design flaw. It’s inconvenient for the owner, but far less expensive for the manufacturer. With software, by contrast, all the software vendor has to do is make a corrected version of the software available for download and installation, the software equivalent of shipping everyone a new car! It’s no more expensive to “ship” hundreds of megabytes of “brand-new” code than it is a tiny bit. Such are the wonders of software.
Software factory recalls are part of everyday life. Software creators are maddeningly unable to create error-free software that is also cyber-secure. See this.
We’ve all become accustomed to the Three Stooges model of building software.
There are highly paid hordes of cossetted employees enjoying free lunches and lounging on bean bags on luxurious campuses, “hard at work” creating leading edge software whose only consistent feature is that it’s late, expensive and chock full of bugs and security flaws.
While the Three Stooges and their loyal armies of followers are busily at work creating standards, regulations and academic departments devoted to churning out well-indoctrinated new members of the Stooge brigades, rebels are quietly at work creating software that is needed to meet the needs of under-served customers, using tools and methods that … gasp! … actually work. What an idea!
The good news is that the rebels are often richly rewarded for their apostasy by customers who eagerly use the results of their work. It’s a good thing for the customers that the totalitarian masters of the Three Stooges software status quo are no better at enforcing their standards than they are at building software that, you know, works.
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