Starting from this 2 golden rules:

1) It is more important to reduce the Effort of Maintenance than it is to reduce the Effort of Implementation.

2) The Effort of Maintenance is proportional to the complexity of the system.

I have the feelling that "Software Maintainance" is what is most overseen in large projects on the technical and highlevel pov.

Is cleary that we have a perspective GAP between non-maintainer people and maintainer of project ( take care how to improve and simplify the codebase, ensure is working without regression, etc).

We are keeping pushing new feature in codebases without a feeling,scientific metrics on the complexity of the codebase with real data. How much it costs in term of time for adding new feature ABC that is not breaking backward API and old feature BB? Is the codebase still safe or like bunch of hacks? Do we have metrics/tracks for hacks? Do we need more transparency about the complexity of codebases?

I want to research:

1) can we measure software maintainance concretely? i don't mean scrum points and so on, i want a real metric like how many commits were on maintainace, bugfixing in maintainance, testsfailure and can we provide some tooling in this direction, for having a feeling of maintaince and detecting complexity.

2) how to make scrum/kanban etc systems more aware of Maintance tasks ( like is something PR-REVIEW a valid column for scrum), and on this direction research how big projects also works with scrum ( outside and inside suse)

This project is little related to https://hackweek.suse.com/17/projects/x-suse-files-forensic-architecture-of-large-crime-scenes-of-codebases-aka-lets-maintain-and-bisect-architecture-problems-and-more-in-software-design