Maintenance Effort Trend
governance
environmental
systemic
This metric tracks the trend of maintenance and fixing effort per release, expressed as the total number of hours spent on corrective and preventive maintenance activities. It makes visible how sustainable a system is to operate and evolve over time.
In a Green Agile context, the Maintenance Effort Trend links technical quality, long-term maintainability, and economic sustainability. Rising maintenance effort often signals accumulating technical debt, architectural erosion, or insufficient automation, while a falling trend indicates improving code health and more sustainable delivery practices.
Classification
- Category: Governance, Reporting & Compliance
- Measurement Frequency: per release
- Responsibility:
- Engineering Team: measurement
- Product Lead: steering and prioritization
Impact
A decreasing maintenance effort trend indicates that systems become easier and cheaper to maintain, freeing capacity for value-adding work. An increasing trend highlights growing operational friction and long-term risk, as more effort is required to keep the system stable and functional.
Because maintenance effort accumulates across releases and teams, this metric represents a systemic impact. It supports governance by enabling informed trade-offs between feature delivery, refactoring, and long-term sustainability of the product.
Calculation
The Maintenance Effort Trend is calculated as the change in maintenance effort compared to the previous release:
\[\Delta \text{Maintenance Effort} = \text{Maintenance Hours}_{\text{current release}} - \text{Maintenance Hours}_{\text{previous release}}\]Maintenance hours typically include bug fixing, refactoring, corrective actions, and routine upkeep tasks. The desired direction is a falling trend over time.
Example
Assume the following maintenance effort was recorded:
- Previous release: 180 hours
- Current release: 140 hours
The change is:
\[140 - 180 = -40 \text{ hours}\]This negative delta indicates an improvement in maintainability. If future releases show increasing maintenance effort, teams can use this metric to justify refactoring, architectural improvements, or process changes.