A SoftwareJanitor is a GruntProgrammer who comes in to clean up the other developers' messes or do otherwise necessary yet unglamorous tasks.

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In the OpenSource world, certain classes of bugs are categorized as "Janitorial". This encompasses low-priority changes that are mostly mechanical but widespread, such as adapting to API changes, fixing whitespace, adding comments, removing warnings, easy refactorings, adding UnitTest''''''s, etc. They are typically left for newbies, since widespread, easy changes are a good way to get to know the CodeBase. Sometimes you'll also see a core dev slumming it as a SoftwareJanitor.