At a theme park near where I live, one of the rides keeps stopping halfway through. This hiccup makes the people on the ride feel frustrated as well as those in the queue. Meanwhile; the staff receive a lot of complaints, and the queue just gets longer. The ride still isn’t working properly a year later. It’s obvious that extra staff are needed to get the ride running again when it stops, to speak to customers, and most importantly, to fix the issue once and for all.

This situation reminds me of how buggy software is sometimes used in a production environment. The immediate support cases that result are so time-consuming that little time is left to fix the root causes. The maintenance staff are overwhelmed with bugs, and a poor user experience results. It’s also much harder to add new features when the software is full of bugs.

In order to save costs, some of my bosses have placed strong emphasis on reducing maintenance as far as possible. For the developers—and everyone else for that matter—supporting software with low maintenance was a lot more productive—and much more fun! We could spend more time expanding the product, testing the new version and making the user happy.