Maintenance may be more than we think

The effort for systems is often split into "development" and "maintenance". Development is considered the premium of the two: creating a new system to address a business need; maintenance is often considered the "dirty work" of minor adjustments and corrections.

I've been thinking about the terms "development" and "maintenance", and I think our ideas need to change.

Let's consider a non-software example. Let's suppose that we build a hotel in a remote tropical location, on beachfront property. It's a simple hotel with decent rooms and a basic restaurant, but nothing special. With our current understanding of "development" and "maintenance", the construction of such a hotel is clearly "development".

Our hotel is isolated, and far away from other hotels and restaurants.

There are clearly maintenance tasks: cleaning the rooms and hallways, stocking the refrigerators (perhaps one considers that task part of "operations"), and repairing the corrosion from the salty air.

A major change, such as adding air conditioning to the guest rooms or a swimming pool in the common area, is considered "development".

But suppose that we don't add air conditioning or a swimming pool. Suppose we keep our simple hotel, but others buy property nearby and build hotels of their own. (Other people recognize the business opportunity we are enjoying.) And suppose further that they build hotels with air conditioning and swimming pools. We lose some business to the newer, fancier hotels in the area.

Now we're in a different situation. Faced with competition, we're forced to take action. Adding a swimming pool or air conditioning to our hotel is not development, at least not in the sense of defining a new service or market. Enhancing our resort to match the competition is less a matter of expansion and more a matter of stemming the loss of business. In this case, adding a swimming pool is "maintenance".

Development gets you into the market, and maintenance keeps you in the market.

Taking this view of development and maintenance for programs, maintenance becomes a task much larger than simply fixing defects and making minor changes. Maintenance is the act of staying competitive. That includes corrections of defects, and it includes major features to match the competition. It includes adjustments to match changes to the operating system, such as the GUI changes for Windows 8.

Which means that maintenance more than our traditional idea. In one sense it is the old idea of keeping something running. The old sense was focussed on the the thing; the new sense looks at the thing (the program, the hotel, etc.) and the environment. We have to keep the thing running in a changing environment.

One can argue about enhancements to a computer system (or a hotel) and the classification into the categories of "development" and "maintenance". There may be tax ramifications for that classification -- especially for "maintenance contracts". I'm ignoring the tax issues here.

Development and maintenance are perhaps not as distinct as we like to think. If we consider the environment, then enhancements to a system may be either development or maintenance, depending on the surrounding systems.