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This is an unhelpful oversimplification. There are lots of tasks that are maintenance, and the more code your team has written the more these tasks build up. I
by gloryless 4y ago
This is an unhelpful oversimplification. There are lots of tasks that are maintenance, and the more code your team has written the more these tasks build up. I don't know what motivates someone to pretend it is the same as writing new features, but it deals with distinctly different risks.
- throwaway_au_1 4y agoI think it's sensible to be critical of the language used in our craft, especially when borrowed from the more physical world, because with it comes the baggage. For example, I have a pet peeve with the phrase "use the right tool for the job" used in the context of languages/stacks, because languages and stacks are more akin to building materials than tools (IMO). Selecting a building material and selecting a tool involve different considerations, and thought-terminating cliches like the above can give a false sense of clarity. So IMO, to look at software maintenance as the author has done, I think is fair and reasonable, even if just to render obvious that software maintenance is a special variety of maintenance that differs from most usages of 'maintenance'.