Keyvan Nayyeri

In the last few months I’ve been writing a post series about hiring experienced architects and developers and its impact on the success of projects and saving the resources.

So far I’ve written five posts to introduce the topic and discuss planning, architecture, development, and debugging stages in software development cycle. Now I’m going to wrap this discussion up and complete this series by talking about maintenance stage.

Of course, there could be a separate post about testing stage which is a common part of today’s software development practices, but it’s mostly a part of development and debugging stages, and could be supported by some similar reasons as them; therefore, I neglect adding that post as I also neglect including discussions about some other uncommon or minor development stages.

There is no doubt that you can’t guarantee the correct functionality of your projects forever, and interestingly, software systems become mature when they run on production for a while until good features can be added to the system and some hidden common problems can be resolved. The bigger your projects are, the more your chances are to have a maintenance contract for a project, so it’s your own responsibility to keep your software up. Of course, any weakness in this area can affect the overall success of your projects. Even the best developed systems are not thorough until they work for a while.

Quality of software maintenance directly relates to the quality of software development and debugging. The better you build software and the better you structure your code, the easier you maintain it, and this is a pretty simple principle in software development. Therefore, here you see the repetition of an important reason that you need skilled developers for development, debugging, and testing.

But aside from this, having an experienced developer for maintenance responsibilities is also very important. An experienced developer can master a project faster, and can resolve the issues in a shorter time. Besides, he’s able to apply better changes to the software during the maintenance to avoid further issues. I’ve seen many developers who add bigger issues to the production software just to maintain it.

Having a good developer on board can also save money from the project owners, and I’ve seen this with my own eyes. I was watching the progress of a project where some mediocre developers had developed the code, and the company had assigned an amateur developer to maintain and support it.

In action they experienced serious difficulties with the project and in fact that support guy had become a nightmare for the project. When he was asked to work on something, he was just calling the original developers to explain everything for them on phone. The worse case was when he had applied a change which caused bigger issues, and made the whole project down. All the development team were called to the office to resolve that issue for several hours!

One day I sat and did a simple calculation for myself and realized that the company is spending the exact same resources on original developers to help this maintainer, and in fact he was not maintaining the system. He was just playing with it!