Maintainability generates developer joy
As a developer, would you rather work on software where changes are easy or on software where changes are hard? Don’t answer; it’s a rhetorical question.
Aside from the direct influence on the cost of change, maintainability has another benefit: it makes developers happy (or, depending on the current project they’re working on, it at least makes them less sad).
The term I want to use to describe this happiness is developer joy. It’s also known as developer experience or developer enablement. Whatever we call it, it means that we provide the context developers need to do their work well.
Developer joy is directly related to developer productivity. In general, if developers are happy, they do better work. And if they do good work, they are happier. There’s a two-way correlation between developer joy and developer productivity:
Figure 1.2 – Developer joy influences developer...
