The only factor that explained the variation was the success of the project. More successful projects spent less time writing initial code relative to time in m

The only factor that explained the variation was the success of the project. More successful projects spent less time writing initial code relative to time in maintenance. Failed projects spent a great portion on writing code. Again, the obvious implication is that if your project is a failure, you sink less time into maintaining it. The only way to reduce the maintenance burden is to not have users. There is some not-so-subtle self-sabotage going on here. It's difficult to figure out causality in these cases. Did the project fail because of inadequate investment in engineering foundations? Or did we deprioritize work on it because we knew it wasn't going to take off? Likely both, working in a negative feedback loop.