[teampractices] "Maintenance" vs "New work"

[Bryan Davis]

On Tue, Aug 11, 2015 at 10:40 AM, Kevin Smith <ksmith at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Aug 10, 2015 at 10:20 AM, Bryan Davis <bd808 at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>>
>> This "burden" is not unique to the WMF or FLOSS systems. This is one
>> of the reasons that a typical software development organization with
>> stable funding grows its developer team at a fairly constant rate.
>> That head count growth doesn't go into acceleration of new
>> development; it is instead used to offset the constantly increasing
>> maintenance cost of running a successful software product.
>
>
> I'm not sure exactly what you mean, but there's a chance I might disagree.
> If you are suggesting an inevitability that code will become harder and
> harder to maintain over time, I'll push back. Yes, most teams end up needing
> more developers to compensate for ever-increasing tech debt, but that effect
> can be reduced, if not avoided. I worked on a 14-year-old codebase, and
> although it was far from perfect, it remained quite maintainable. That was
> mostly thanks to extensive unit tests, strict coding styles, and ongoing
> aggressive refactoring.

I'm not so much describing tech debt (which I take to mean shortcuts
that were made in pursuit of shipping sooner) but just that each
feature of the code base whether user visible or only developer
visible has an ongoing cost. Requirements and usage will generally
change over time and this change will necessitate revisiting the code
and all code that depends on it. As you point out, up front investment
in unit tests and a culture of refactoring should make finding areas
in need of attention easier. That is the business case for investing
in that additional work initially.

In my (admittedly brief) career at the WMF I haven't seen a strong
acceptance of this need for this type care and feeding at least at a
departmental level. I have a much longer rant on that topic that would
be inappropriate to paste here. :)

Bryan
-- 
Bryan Davis              Wikimedia Foundation    <bd808 at wikimedia.org>
[[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]]  Sr Software Engineer            Boise, ID USA
irc: bd808                                        v:415.839.6885 x6855