Comment by bluGill

> that most programming is maintenance.

What do you mean by maintenance?

A strict definition would be "the software is shipping but customers have encountered a bug bad enough that we will fix it". Most work is not of this type.

Most work is "the software is shipping but customers really want some new feature". Let us be clear though, even though it often is counted as maintenance, this is adding more features. If you had decided up front to not ship until all these features were in place it wouldn't change the work at all in most cases (once in a while it would because the new feature doesn't fit cleanly into the original architecture in a way that if you had known in advance you would have used a different architecture)