If you don’t schedule maintenance, your equipment will schedule it for you.
The external struggle in manufacturing:
“My machinery is having too much downtime. It needs comprehensive maintenance.”
Ok, I need 12 solid hours and I’ll give it back to you good as new.
“What?! 12 hours! That’s insanity, it’s already racked up 20 hours of downtime this month, I can’t spare 12 hours! Can’t you just do it next month?”
Repeat every month.
If broke, fix it.
Preventive maintenance.
Software
That’s how you get into tech debt, stuck with entire infrastructure written in COBOL.
And unpatched vulnerabilities
And even for purely UI changes, the UI totally impacts user adoption. Eg, a 90s style grey everything form is going to feel outdated to many users and they’ll associate that with the rest of the software being dated (regardless of whether or not it’s true). If your goal is adoption/sales, you often have to keep changing the UI even if it’s not broke with regards to functionality.
Preventive maintenance? As in, where you take your car in every year for an oil change so it doesn’t end up as one gigantic blob that gums up your entire engine or having your brake pads completely disintegrate, cleaning the lint out of a sewing machine, greasing your bike gears, …
If it can be modified or improved, do it.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
A pint of sweat saves a gallon of blood
If it ain’t broke, break it?
There is a german (left) proverb “Mach kaputt, was dich kaputt macht.” Which translates to “Break what breaks you.”
In the sense of destroy the systems which try to break you.
