if by maintenance work, you mean "patch up the system so it keep trudging a long" then sure. it sucks.
And I feel that when people refer to maintenance work that is what they end up doing.
I like improving systems (I think it is a much a bigger challenge than making a new system from scratch). I suppose this is a kind of maintenance work.
But I am still trying to figure out how to get the green flag to do this. I often want to re-architecture big parts of the system; but at the same time, I don't want get overworked (neither does anybody really).
I find that I don't really have an incentive to refactor a semi-large part of the code into a better design (how do I even know if it's better? seems subjective). My incentives (deliver the story, complete the sprint's points) push me to just change as little as I can (patch it up) and then forget about it instead of refactoring a lot of it.
And every time I have done that I keep thinking as I do it: "this is exactly how this code got to this point. A few generations of developers with no incentive to refactor this from a slightly bigger picture, just carefully hack in what the story requires and move on". aah the joy of software engineering in real life :/
And I feel that when people refer to maintenance work that is what they end up doing.
I like improving systems (I think it is a much a bigger challenge than making a new system from scratch). I suppose this is a kind of maintenance work.
But I am still trying to figure out how to get the green flag to do this. I often want to re-architecture big parts of the system; but at the same time, I don't want get overworked (neither does anybody really).
I find that I don't really have an incentive to refactor a semi-large part of the code into a better design (how do I even know if it's better? seems subjective). My incentives (deliver the story, complete the sprint's points) push me to just change as little as I can (patch it up) and then forget about it instead of refactoring a lot of it.
And every time I have done that I keep thinking as I do it: "this is exactly how this code got to this point. A few generations of developers with no incentive to refactor this from a slightly bigger picture, just carefully hack in what the story requires and move on". aah the joy of software engineering in real life :/