“The Pragmatic Programmer” first introduced me to the idea that writing software is like planting a garden. Over the years I’d forgotten the importance of the metaphor, until recently when I started working on my real-world garden. Musing on my day in the office whilst tending my plants, I realised gardening really does have a lot in common with working with legacy code.

With a 10-year-old, monolithic code base that’s being updated every day, staying on top of maintenance at FreeAgent is no easy matter. In this talk I’ll share how thinking about development in terms of gardening has helped me to understand the maintenance burden. I’ll talk about how we handle routine and exceptional maintenance in the product teams at FreeAgent and I’ll share some of the techniques we use to balance maintenance with feature development.