The crone and the hydra: Figuring temporal relations to aging code

Abstract

Managing older software code, often referred to as legacy code, entails a great deal of complexity, as the longer a software system has been around, the more likely it has been subjected to revisions and has grown in its interdependencies to other components written at different times by different people. This can lead to software being seen as aging and in decline as it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain. At the same time, writing new lines of code or updating to new platforms, languages, and software tools, can also be positioned as a means to rejuvenate organizational work, acting as a salve to overcome hardware limitations, or other forms of stagnation. Software is thus discursively figured as immaterial and atemporal, on the one hand, and as excessively material and corporeal, on the other. This duality of software means that the figuring of software's decline is highly subjective and rife with normative tropes that distinguish between forms of software change that that are desirable and those that are unwanted, what is worthy of maintenance or should be abandoned, what systems are considered aging versus evolving and enduring. This article considers how, in practice, software developers and engineers understand the aging of software. How and when is software coded as aged and old, what is at stake in these delineations, and what do these stakes surface about temporal regimes of software work? Through close readings of software engineering discourse and ethnographic vignettes, I examine how software's aging is figured through age coded tropes, and how these in turn contribute to the chrononormativities of software maintenance. I show how tropes of aging software are associated with the abject, excess, and grotesque, and with existing gendered hierarchies in software work that privilege atemporal and ahistorical relationships to code.