Great topic.  

I browsed the archives on perlmonks and found the following thread on Code
Maintenance that is semi-useful.
http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?lastnode_id=26199&node_id=26170

It pointed to the following three resources- 

  The book "Code Complete" (also by Steve McConnell) is apparently well
respected and from its table of contents seems very relevent to QA and
code maintenance.
http://www1.fatbrain.com/asp/bookinfo/bookinfo.asp?theisbn=1556154844&vm=

Two columns by MJ Dominus on revamping other peoples' perl programs
(his summaries at the bottom are good advice):

  Program Repair Shop and Red Flags
http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2000/11/repair3.html

  Return of Program Repair Shop and Red Flags
http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2000/06/commify.html

I'm interested in seeing where this project goes.

-Daniel

$_='[EMAIL PROTECTED] 519-575-3733  /Prescient Code Solutions/  coder.com
';s/-/ /g;s/([.@])/ $1/g;@y=(42*1476312054+7*3,14120504e4,-42*330261-33,
42*5436+3,42*2886+10,42*434987+5);s/(.)/ord(uc($1))/ge;for(@x=split/32/;
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On Tue, 12 Mar 2002, Sean Quinlan wrote:

> 
> [forwarded submission from a non-member address -- rjk]
> 
> 
> From: Sean Quinlan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2002 20:43:52 -0500
> Subject: maintenance of large perl code bases
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 
> I had hoped to bring up this question at tomorrows meeting, but Wednesday's
> are hard, and tomorrow looks impossible. So maybe someone can toss this up
> for discussion, and hopefully let the list know the key points.
> 
> I know there are sights out there, such as Boston.com it appears, and I've
> heard about some large financial institutions, that rely on substantial
> amounts of Perl code. Obviously for a successful business, having that code
> be maintainable is (or should be!) of significant importance. But I
> regularly hear complaints, largely from non-Perl (or Perl primary anyway)
> people from other industries coming into bioinformatics, about these large,
> unmaintainable Perl code bases.
> 
> Now, in my experience, I have to admit this is largely more true than not.
> Usually because most of the software was written by people who were
> biologists/engineers/physicists/whatever first, and programmers (sometimes
> distant) second, often without thought or concern of it's long term
> usability. So I've heard of a few places now moving away from Perl,
> frequently apparently forcing a large ground up recode in some other
> (usually in Java, and I've heard some interesting 'rumors' as to why)
> language.
> 
> I see little point in arguing with this from the standpoint of simply Perl
> first. I know others better than I have done talks and presentations on
> writing maintainable Perl code, and probably on the problems with porting
> old code to a more maintainable format. I want to steal from those people
> ... blatantly (with credits of course).
> 
> What I would like to do is to collaborate with a few people who have:
> 1) Done presentations related to the subject of code maintenance (and a
> little QA thrown in might be good).
> 
> 2) Have been involved with or responsible for large installations of Perl
> code that was well maintained.
> 
> 3) Others involved with bioinformatics interested in or having experience
> with this problem.
> 
> What I would like to and up with are sources for presentations (preferably
> a couple already canned of varied lengths) on the subject of maintaining
> large Perl code bases written specifically as it applies to bioinformatics.
> If you don't want/have time to collaborate, but have pointers to good
> sources of information/inspiration, please also pipe up.
> 
> Thanks everyone!!!
> 
> 
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Sean P. Quinlan
> http://people.ne.mediaone.net/squinlan/index.html
> mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> "You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of
> conversation" - Plato
> 


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