| Absolutely good points! I used to work in a (Scrum) team where 80% of our projects were in maintenance mode exactly the way you described. It felt horrible to work there as an engineer (at least for me who enjoys creative processes and development). You still get all the meetings, administration, rituals, debates over minuscule stuff - without delivering any customer value. There were entire sprints where most of the team hasn't shipped any useful feature, only fixing cryptic bugs in "other people's code" that nobody really cares about or keeping up with the latest changes in the NIH syndrome-ridden microservice environment. Realizing that such a large organization can't be fixed, I moved over to a different company where the engineering team works more with a "product engineer" mindset. Probably the best decision in my career so far! We're still "maintaining" software, fix bugs and refactor etc., but due to how Shape Up [1] works, creating customer value vs. maintenance is almost always 6 weeks vs. 2 weeks so 3:1. But even for a Scrum team in a large org where some projects are passed around like hot potatoes, I'd never assign more than 50% maintenance mode projects to any team. This may not be the most efficient from the organization's standpoint, but it would probably do wonders for preventing burnout and employee churn. [1] https://basecamp.com/shapeup/ |