Steve Jones - SSC Editor (10/22/2012)
L' Eomot Inversé (10/21/2012)
I suspect you are making the same mistake as one of the commenters on the original post, and treating the "you" in "you write it, you support it" as referring to an individual instead of to the development team as a whole, because I can't imagine any reason for limiting this support to a couple of months other than that the person who wrote the code may no longer be available.I was speaking of "you" as the author of the code, not the department. While the department should support the code forever, the author, who may or may not be there, shouldn't be tasked with long term support, especially after hours. I think that builds a dread in developers that any mistake will haunt them for a long time.
A couple of months weeds out the major, obvious bugs. Things that should be caught earlier, and I think it's fair for the author to get some "on call" time to iron those out if they shortcut development. However a year later when a power user finds a problem, I would argue the bug should go through a submittal, triage, and fix by someone in development, not necessarily the author.
I think there's a bit of a red herring going. Most of the time developers end up supporting their apps until death because of the deplorable documentation of both the project objectives, the constraints and assumptions and whatever the acceptance for said project should be. It's not a matter of whether they HAVE to, but more than no one else can pick up for them since noone has enough info for the context.
Until you start getting a meaningful set of requirements with testable outputs which can be matched up to good covering unit and end-to-end tests that validate the functionality, a warranty is completely and utterly meaningless.
Now - we developers also play a part in that, since we too ften don't spend enough time documenting HOW we did something or WHY we chose a specific design over another, but we're only one small part of a much bigger issue.
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Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part...unless you're my manager...or a director and above...or a really loud-spoken end-user..All right - what was my emergency again?