“Maintenance? I never do maintenance!” I hear you say. “I’m a game programmer! A coder who lives on the bleeding edge and doesn’t have to bother with boring stuff like that. That’s for stuffy database programmers, not for me.”
Have you ever tackled a problem that was supposed to be solved by writing some code in half an hour, but that code haunted you (or your coworkers, much to their chagrin I’m sure) for months or years to come? Then you have felt first hand the consequences of maintenance, the hidden cost of software.