More on Age of Conan and priority

It looks like someone at Funcom has found that communicating with the "product owners"/customer is a good thing. Here you can read about a Funcom employee asking for a list of bugs and new ideas.

Lets hope they keep things like that going and make AoC a great game

Maintenance project?

In software engineering, software maintenance is the modification of a software product after delivery to correct faults, to improve performance or other attributes, or to adapt the product to a modified environment.”(ISO/IEC 14764). [Wikipedia]

I have been bugged by the term maintenance project for a long time and it is time to vent the frustration here. The project I am working with has two parts, one for development and another for maintenance. While the project is called a maintenance project we actually do produce a lot more new functionality than correcting fault and adapt the product. Many projects are in the same environment and it is unfortunate that they are called maintenance project when they actually should be rid of the term maintenance. We do maintenance as well, but not to the extent that it should be reflected in the name.

The reason I bring this up is because maintenance is not a popular word and people start to get all kind of ideas when they hear the term. People often say that maintenance projects does not use any new technology, they do not do anything exciting (from a developers perspective). Well this is in our case wrong. We do new functionality every day and we make use of some of the newest technology out there. Our code grows and adapts with new technology.

Let me mention some of this years improvements to the code and environment:
New platform: Moved from IBM Websphere to JBoss.
New JDK: Moved from IBM JDK 1.4.2 to Sun JDK 1.5
EJB2.1 to EJB3
.Net1.1 to .Net2
New EpiServer version
RAD to IntelliJ
..and a lot more!

I think one of the important tasks in a project is using new technology, not for the sake of having new toys, but to be able to move forward. The changes we made in the project have made new functionality possible in new and better ways for our customer.

So my suggestion is to stop using the term maintenance when the project delivers more than 70% new functionality instead of maintenance as defined at the top of this blog. Make room for new technology in you project not only for your own motivation, but also for the sake of your customer.