In
software engineering
Software engineering is a systematic engineering approach to software development.
A software engineer is a person who applies the principles of software engineering to design, develop, maintain, test, and evaluate computer software. The term '' ...
, critical mass is a stage in the
life cycle
Life cycle, life-cycle, or lifecycle may refer to:
Science and academia
*Biological life cycle, the sequence of life stages that an organism undergoes from birth to reproduction ending with the production of the offspring
* Life-cycle hypothesis ...
when the
source code
In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the w ...
grows too complicated to effectively manage without a complete rewrite.
At the critical mass stage, fixing a
bug introduces one or more new bugs.
Tools such as
high-level programming language
In computer science, a high-level programming language is a programming language with strong abstraction from the details of the computer. In contrast to low-level programming languages, it may use natural language ''elements'', be easier to us ...
s and techniques such as
programming in the large
In software engineering, programming in the large and programming in the small refer to two different aspects of writing software, namely, designing a larger system as a composition of smaller parts, and creating those smaller parts by writing li ...
,
code refactoring
In computer programming and software design, code refactoring is the process of restructuring existing computer code—changing the '' factoring''—without changing its external behavior. Refactoring is intended to improve the design, structur ...
and
test-driven development
Test-driven development (TDD) is a software development process relying on software requirements being converted to test cases before software is fully developed, and tracking all software development by repeatedly testing the software against al ...
, exist to make it easier to maintain large, complicated programs.
See also
*
High-level programming language
In computer science, a high-level programming language is a programming language with strong abstraction from the details of the computer. In contrast to low-level programming languages, it may use natural language ''elements'', be easier to us ...
*
Programming in the large
In software engineering, programming in the large and programming in the small refer to two different aspects of writing software, namely, designing a larger system as a composition of smaller parts, and creating those smaller parts by writing li ...
*
Code refactoring
In computer programming and software design, code refactoring is the process of restructuring existing computer code—changing the '' factoring''—without changing its external behavior. Refactoring is intended to improve the design, structur ...
*
Test-driven development
Test-driven development (TDD) is a software development process relying on software requirements being converted to test cases before software is fully developed, and tracking all software development by repeatedly testing the software against al ...
*
The Mythical Man-Month
''The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering'' is a book on software engineering and project management by Fred Brooks first published in 1975, with subsequent editions in 1982 and 1995. Its central theme is that adding manpower to a ...
References
Software project management
{{software-eng-stub