Design debt economics: A vocabulary for describing the causes, costs, and cures for software maintainability problems
On many application development teams, the ongoing choices, actions, and practices of team members can have a negative impact on code maintainability and hence overall code quality. Until these issues are discerned and tended to, they will become more and more costly, in terms of increasing the time required to perform changes and in ongoing developer resource cost. Further, risk of regression defects increases when code maintainability is compromised, because code that is not properly maintained is inherently more brittle.
This article underscores the importance of code maintainability for application owners and development teams, describes the future impacts of neglecting code maintainability problems, attempts to impart an appropriate sense of urgency for resolving such problems where they are found, and presents some proven solutions.
John Elm
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/edge/09/jun09/designdebteconomics/index.html
200907 development process software economics software maintenance