[ponector]

Both maintenance and testing are not valued by business. Because you cannot sell maintenance to the customer, you only can sell features.

From the developer's point of view maintenance also a thing to avoid. You cannot put a maintenance as a shiny point to your CV. Everyone wants to see your achievements, projects you shipped, and with modern technology, of course.

[SamuelAdams]

It depends on your business and your clients. Maintenance in the form of compliance always sells, albeit begrudgingly. If maintaining various compliance requirements is required (like DoD), then maintenance budgets are usually flush with cash.

[mcmcmc]

This is very true. I work in MSP not software dev, but banking/finance clients almost always have budget for regular hardware refresh and premium support agreements. And they fork over tons of cash for security auditing and all the licensing.

[generic92034]

> Because you cannot sell maintenance to the customer, you only can sell features.

That does not seem to be true in many B2B areas. Software suppliers are selling maintenance and support contracts to their customers. Think ERP.

[danenania]

Even when a company sells maintenance/support/compliance, the incentive is still to put as few actual development hours into these columns as possible, and to pay as little as possible for those hours.

What is actually being sold is a promise, and that really comes from the sales department, not the engineering department. Once the customer signs the contract, the incentive is to do the minimum possible to keep the promise--or better said, break it infrequently and non-egregiously enough that the customer doesn't churn (or sue). So you'll unfortunately still be viewed as a cost-center at many companies if you're working on this stuff.

[generic92034]

You are not considering the power dynamics in B2B. The customers get SLAs in their maintenance and support contracts, including monetary penalties. It is also a repetitive business. Bad experiences actually count.

In my experience, if anything development support/maintenance is delivering too much in many cases, i. e. not limiting themselves to fixing bugs, but enhancing functions on customer request.

[ponector]

Maintenance of your software. Can you sell bug fixing of your software? You can sell new features. Of course you will add a line to the contract about bug fixing, and put few poor souls occasionally to fix issues reported by vip customers, but it is not a selling point.

[generic92034]

See my reply to the sibling - in many B2B settings it is really different.

[v-erne]

>> Both maintenance and testing are not valued by business.

It depends on the incentives I suppose - if commission and bonuses for sales people comes only from new sales, then sure, maintenance is irrelevant and will be ignored.

>> Because you cannot sell maintenance to the customer, you only can sell features.

No, that's not true at all. If sales people are properly incentivised to sell support contracts (their base salary being a percent of maintenance fee for example) then it will be sold like crazy. I have seen this happen at my company - at one point we did not need new sales to be profitable - just raking support contracts fees was enough to keep up costs and then some.

[ponector]

Support contract does not linked directly to the maintenance of the software you are selling.

More support contract does not mean company will assign more resources into maintenance of software itself.

[v-erne]

If you work for people that are only extracting value and are making decision based on next quarter predictions then I can see that.

This is why I do not work for faceless corporation. I deliberately sticked with small lifestyle business that values maintenance as much as new sales (as a matter of fact just this week I was refactoring my own, original piece of code, that its first version is dated by versions control as written 15 years ago and during this whole time there were clients that were paying support fees for it)

[nijave]

You can sell security, support, and compliance and those tend to be tightly related to maintenance. A product hard to maintain becomes a nightmare for any recurring task, security, support and compliance all being examples.

[leowoo91]

You can also price in the effort of maintenance that needs to be done before adding of a new feature. That may explain it better from the leadership perspective.