The Great Web Maintainability Survey

Post from May 14, 2017 (↻ June 5, 2021), filed under Web Development (feed).

The maintenance and economics of websites (and apps) is a much-neglected topic in the web development community, perhaps encouraged by both project owners, who are at times inhibited by counter-productive mindsets, perhaps supported by unhealthy abstraction through tools, frameworks, and libraries.

The cost of maintenance is high, however, manifesting itself in many a redo that should have been a redesign, and that sometimes foolishly so, given that there are many plain unnecessary changes. All changes have a price, and so if there’s one thing imperative in web development then it’s to prevent, by design, all changes that can be avoided—including things as inane as renaming style sheets.

Now, I have written about the maintenance and maintainability of websites for many years, and I deem it’s important to survey the industry again and collect, more comprehensively this time, current good (but also poor) practices around maintainability. For that reason I’ve created a brief survey which I invite you to contribute to:

I have nothing more to say; the survey will be open for one month (until June 14, 2017) to allow for hopefully wide participation. I’ll publish the results in the weeks after—stay updated through one of this site’s feeds or on Twitter.

Update (June 16, 2017)

The results are in, the survey is closed, and I’ve already started doing something useful with all the feedback. Thank you!

About Me

I’m Jens, and I’m an engineering lead and author. I’ve worked as a technical lead for Google, I’m close to W3C and WHATWG, and I write and review books for O’Reilly. I love trying things, sometimes including philosophy, art, and adventure. Here on meiert.com I share some of my views and experiences.

If you have a question or suggestion about what I write, please leave a comment (if available) or a message. Thank you!