Recently, I've been thinking hard about what makes code maintainable, and how to write code to be maintainable. This interest has partly been driven by the mentoring of those starting out in C++ that I've been doing, both through the ACCU mentored developers program, and for work.

The principles I've identified have not really been hidden; since they've been widely documented for years, and they're actually things that most good developers do as a matter of course. However, as with many things, you don't necessarily realize their benefits until you rediscover them yourself.

This is the second of a two part article describing an experiment carried out during the 2003 ACCU conference. The first part was published in a previous issue of C Vu (15.6, December 2003) and discussed the background to the experiment and some of the applicable characteristics of the subjects taking part; this one, the second, discusses the results of the experiment.