Maintainability enables functionality

Now back to my claim that maintainability is more important than functionality from the beginning of this chapter.

If you ask a product person what’s most important in a software project, they’ll tell you that the value the software provides to its users is the most important thing. Software that doesn’t provide value to its users means that users don’t pay for it. And without paying users, we don’t have a working business model, which is the main measure of success in the business world.

So, our software needs to provide value. But it shouldn’t provide value at the cost of maintainability.2 Think about how much more efficient and joyful it is to add functionality to a software system that is easily changeable as compared to a software system where you have to fight your way through one line of code at a time! I’m pretty sure that you’ve worked on one of those software projects where...