Chapter 4. Motivation
Thirty years ago Yourdon and Constantine in Structured Design identified economics as the underlying driver of software design. Software should be designed to reduce its overall cost. The cost of software is divided into the initial cost and the cost of maintenance:
costtotal = costdevelop + costmaintain
Once the industry gained experience with software development, it was a big surprise to many that the cost of maintenance is much higher than the cost of initial development. (Projects with little or no maintenance should use a very different set of implementation patterns from those presented in the remainder of this book.)
Maintenance is expensive because understanding existing code is time-consuming and error-prone. ...
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