[Themaintainers] the maintainers: introduction

[Ensmenger, Nathan]

Lee — thank you for setting up this list.   I am looking forward to a productive conversation.

I am Nathan Ensmenger and I am an historian of computing at Indiana University. Among other things, I am interested in the history of software maintenance, and have recently worked up a (very rough draft) of a paper on this topic.

Software maintenance is a curious phenomenon.  For the most part, software is not a technology that we think of as material.  It does not break, wear out, or need to be tightened/lubricated.  In theory, once a software system is working, it should continue working in perpetuity.

In practice, however, software maintenance is the single largest consumer of time and resources in the entire software development lifecycle.  In most software projects, maintenance represents between 70-80% of the overall cost of development.  Most programmers spend most of their careers maintaining other people’s code. And yet, like most forms of maintenance, no one talks much about software maintenance, or plans for it, or allows for it in their budgets and schedule.

I am particularly interested in the ways in which the problem of software maintenance connects the history of computing to more traditional forms of technology, infrastructure, and labor.  For a technology that we generally think of as ephemeral, software is surprisingly durable.   I hope and expect that by connecting this form of work to the larger history of maintenance, I will open up new ways of thinking about the history of software.  

If you are interested in reading the draft paper, you can find it here: http://goo.gl/ymMysJ

-Nathan 

—
Nathan Ensmenger
Associate Professor of Informatics
School of Informatics and Computing
Indiana University, Bloomington
homes.soic.indiana.edu/nensmeng/