[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)