As software matures, it tends to go through this cycle where it receives lots of innovation, new ideas, and attention from the developers who are excited to work on it. As it grows, bugs creep in and less time is spent on enhancing or improving it and more time is spent on fixing bugs. At some point most of the time is spent on maintenance of the software.

I've been in many companies and developers have often followed the software through this lifecycle, sometimes becoming burned out from working on the software for so long. They might resent their knowledge and experience being used on an "old" piece of software. They might even start to dislike working on the software while in the middle of it's life cycle if they have been working on it for more than a year.

How do you keep developers fresh? There must be a balance between using their knowledge of the product to improve things over time, and allowing them to change jobs to something more interesting.

One way to try and ensure that your people don't burn out is to periodically rotate them into new projects. These could be full-time projects that are short term, or maybe part-time projects. You can have them divide their time between the projects, but let them do the division. Give them goals to achieve, deadlines for completion, and then get out of their way. Let them work the way they want.

Make sure that you also balance the workload, giving people projects that excite them, or they see as a challenge, in addition to the more mundane, or tedious work. Everyone understands that there is work that isn't exciting or challenging, but necessary. The key is to balance that with other work that is.

Work can be fun, and the more you strive to make it fun, the more work you'll get from people.

Steve Jones

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