How to make maintenance easier

[This was originally posted at http://timstall.dotnetdevelopersjournal.com/how_to_make_maintenance_easier.htm]

Almost everyone would rather create something new than fix something broken (especially someone else's broken code). However, it's inevitable that some maintenance will always be required. Here are some ideas to make maintenance easier:

• Reduce the amount of work that must be maintained by refactoring your code.
• Add Unit Tests for easier regression testing, and to make sure that your maintenance doesn't break something else.
• Document your work so that it's easier to understand, perhaps with inline comments (maybe using NDoc), wikis, or more traditional word documents for feature designs.
• Design you code to be maintainable - perhaps use simpler algorithms (if all else is equal), loosely couple components so that it's easier to understand, make flexible code, etc...