Day: 20 September 2008

The title of this article isn't a fact, just a thought. However the thought comes from the experience of putting a very complex application into production and watching what happens. So long as there is stuff to do on the application, e.g. further releases adding more functionality, the maintenance costs are minimal, because you can plan the people who do the maintenance to do spend say 20% of their week on maintenance tasks while spending the rest of their time on building the new functionality. But what happens when there is no more new functionality to build? What happens if suddenly there is no budget for new functionality? Well, you normally scale down the team, reducing head count to the minimum required to keep the knowledge about the application. You will probably put them part-time on other projects. But now it gets hard. If the application is very complex or uses many differing technologies, it might not be possible to efficiently (in terms of reducing knowledge loss) reduce the size of the team below a specific size. If you application uses say a BPEL Engine, an Oracle Database, a Java Application Server, has a web front end and connects to several external business partners requiring knowledge of complex business rules, you probably already have the requirement to keep more than five people for maintenance. Mostly, this doesn't cause a problem, because those people can happily staff other projects. But if the application is so complicated that they are certain to…

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