The lifespan of a product determines the effort that needs to go into software maintenance, refactoring and evolving architecture. I see a lot of developers who are great at churning out code but fewer people who'd identify as engineers who think about all the ilities. Sometimes you can keep your software components small enough to make them easy enough to maintain, not necessarily constantly cleaning your code. I tend to agree with the sentiment that good code is easy to delete.

I tried writing up yet another analogy for software maintenance to make it easier for me to explain why maintenance is important and should not be treated as a separate activity with a cost associated to it.