[mehdim]

We have never been successful showing that internal maintainers of the legacy were the ones really paying the bills and delivering the current value of the company. Fame and payroll was mostly towards the cool engineers working on new tech not yet in production serving real customers. I hope Echoes helps giving merit to the one contributing to the economic value of the company

[icecrime]

I certainly hope too, especially as those teams are typically at the crossroads of every initiative and therefore unfairly perceived as "what is slowing us down" rather than "what carries everything else". Echoes can shine a light on their contribution, and on the challenges of being in the middle of it all.

[mehdim]

What is the "Unit of technical/economic value you identify for that? You do it at the Commit level? Build? Deploy?

[icecrime]

Our model of a unit of effort typically originates from a commit. Deployments are declared through an API: because we already know the commits, and most importantly their intents, this tells us what a given release aims to achieve. The next link is to connect that to observable impact.

[mehdim]

Nice. Do you plan to match it with marketing/sales budget per product line or Business unit? To be sure that the effort of "maintaining legacy" is equally measured versus over funded efforts on new features for growth?

Disclaimer : I am running a non profit in my country called "The Maintainers", this is why I look for products that can give more merit to code maintainers.

[icecrime]

That's not currently in the plan, but as Echoes models the engineering organization you could easily see how much of your engineering capacity goes toward maintenance versus new features.

I'd be happy to show you a demo of the product and how it can fit your use case! My time as engineering manager for the maintainers of the Docker open source project was a significant inspiration in creating Echoes, and I'm very familiar with the difficulty of highlighting maintenance work.

[mehdim]

Yes! an "Echoes for Open source" contributions may be one day. Nice work btw, I will try Echoes with my team.