Code Maintenance Costs
Discussions focus on the trade-offs between short-term development speed (e.g., hacks for quick market entry) and long-term costs of maintaining, fixing bugs, and dealing with technical debt in software.
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The cost of dealing and supporting an old codebase instead of burning it all and releasing a written-from-scratch replacement next year
There are many exceptions.1. Sometimes speed = money. Being the first to market, meeting VC-set milestones for additional funding, and not running out of runway are all things cheaper than the alternatives. Software maintenance costs later don't come close to opportunity costs if a company/project fails.2. Most of the software is disposable. It's made to be sold, and the code repo will be chucked into a .zip on some corporate drive. There is no post-launch support, and the s
That's the price of writing maintainable software.
Maintainability and technical debt are very real metrics. It is just question of short-term versus long-term investment. This article prefers short-term investment (as many other startups do). I just wish buyers would include code maintenance costs when evaluating start-up.
The cost of building software pales in comparison to the cost of maintaining, enhancing, and supporting it. Totally nailed it.
Bad software is not cheaper to make (or maintain) in the long-term.
Yeah, code maintenance isn't actually free.
You are excluding the costs of bugs such a rewrite would inevitably produce. Normally that is drastically more expensive then Dev time.
The cost of fixing bugs is correlated with the value your software provides. If you write any software that not much people are using and relying on it (I mean, relying on it to do their job, manage their bank account, their customers...), then a bug on a production system will probably cost you a lot. The other side of that is that code where you don't need software engineering cannot be really relied on. Hacking will help you getting a prototype fast, but if you want to scale you need software
What about this?>Iām almost certain the cost of fixing the code exceeded the margin on revenue due to writing it in the first place.Does bussiness really not care that you have to build the same thing twice?