What Makes Maintenance Goes Awry?

An excellent analysis of the maintenance profession in Dennis Smith's book: Designing Maintainable Software. According to Dennis, the profession of maintenance makes programmers working on maintenance feel that they are inferior to their colleagues working on new development, and they are generally perceived to be less competent and doing less important job in the software team in general. According to Dennis, this positively complicates code because this process selects the most junior and least competent programmer to maintain code in an unprofessional and improper way, which makes code become poor, if not already very poor:

Here is a book excerpt on page 8 describing the problem:

"Careers in programming typically begin by maintaining computer software . Maintenance is considered a relatively harmless activity where entry level programmers can become proficient in the craft (Gorla 91; Rombach 91)"

This, in my opinion is the basic assumption, which makes things go awry with maintenance, which is maintenance is relatively easy and does not need experienced programmers to perform.

"While in maintenance, programmers are expected to obtain a thorough understanding of the department's software conventions, the idiosyncrasies of computer equipment, and the company's culture and methods of operation. Programmers in maintenance are aware that they are at the bottom of the professional hierarchy and look forward to leaving their present assignment. Maintainers demonstrating superior ability advance into more creative positions, such as development programmer, systems analyst, or information specialist. Other's migrate to different positions within the company, or gain employment in another concern where rewards and opportunity for professional growth are more promising. The rest have maintenance as a career."

Then, he says the result of this approach:

"That leaves the task of keeping software properly functioning to programmers who are poorly motivated, have low esteem, and possess marginal skills (Glass & Noiseaux 81)"

This is an excellent articulation of one of the problems that we face in this profession. There are other major differences which he lists among comparing working for maintenance or new development:

1. Maintainers usually work individually while new development work in teams
2. There are almost no planning which takes place. This opens the door for a lot of up's and down's in the maintainer's work. This in practice creates a non-sustainable career.
3. Maintainers usually does other tasks which are marginal an even less important than programming (in their opinion) so that to fill the gaps in their free time.