In order not to become a lifetime maintainer, you need to end-of-life applications. For technical reasons, we aspire to making applications have a long life, bu

In order not to become a lifetime maintainer, you need to end-of-life applications. For technical reasons, we aspire to making applications have a long life, but from a business point of view, it's both unnecessary and difficult. Don't plan for an application to live for more than five years, especially v1. Put enough work into architecture and maintainability to be able to throw it out and redevelop after five years. Be clear about this upfront. In five years' time you won't even be able to find devs to maintain what was developed today. In order to 'maintain' an application properly business needs to keep investing in modernization of the application, which is more than just maintenance. Let's say they need to invest 30% of the original cost per year. Most will not do that saying 'It is a capital asset that I paid for and it should work as expected for as long as I need it' - okay but in five years time it will be so out of date that it will need to be redeveloped.