Measuring the Impact of Software Maintenance
“If you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist” - Peter Drucker
Tackling technical debt can be a thankless task. You can spend hours tidying up old files but at the end there’s little to prove it was a good use of time. No target was met and no new feature exists to show the bosses.
The lack of metrics means that maintenance tasks gets pushed back behind work with obvious outcomes and the debt keeps building.
To make matters worse, the costs of technical debt are also hidden. Projects will start to overrun and developers will get burnt out, but there’s nothing clearly showing that tech debt is the reason why. It means maintenance starts to feel like a chore with no obvious outcome or benefit.
We have had to come up with ways to show the value of our work when performing maintenance for clients, so we wanted to share them here to serve as inspiration for other developers.
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