Are most of your projects one-time or maintenance?

Posted by: Matthew Bass on 06/15/2010

I’m curious about something. If you’re an independent contractor, consultant or freelancer, are most of your projects one-time gigs or do they more frequently involve long term maintenance? There is a lot of different thinking out there about how to handle ongoing work: batch it up and get it done all at once (and pay for it in one chunk too) or spreading it out over a longer period of time (the pain isn’t as severe, but lasts longer).

Most of my projects start as one-time gigs and then evolve into ongoing maintenance work (assuming the client is pleased with what has been produced, which they generally are). I can think of only two instances where a one-time gig was just that… one-time… and didn’t involve ongoing maintenance. What has your experience been?

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About Matthew Bass

Matthew Bass is an independent software developer, entrepreneur, speaker, and writer. He has over ten years of experience across a diverse set of technologies and has worked at places like SAS Institute, the world's largest privately held software company. An agilist from the very beginning, he continues evangelizing and experimenting with pair programming, test-first and behavior-driven development, and continuous integration. Matthew has spoken at several regional and national software conferences and regularly writes for publications like InfoQ.

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