[teampractices] "Maintenance" vs "New work"

[Kevin Smith]

On Mon, Aug 10, 2015 at 10:20 AM, Bryan Davis <bd808 at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> I think I would personally invert Kevin's assertion and say that most
> teams are (or should be) spending a non-trivial amount of time
> performing both maintenance and responsive correction work. Hopefully
> this doesn't rise above a reasonable threshold (say 30%) of the full
> team capacity, but it really would always be there.


I actually proposed 10-20% as a guess, and you're saying not more than 30%.
So I don't see much disagreement between us about the amount of time a team
should spend on maintenance.

I'm not sure yet on the "keeping the lights on" vs. "maintenance"
distinction, but I don't think that matters right now.


> 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.

Kevin
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