I explained that the disadvantage of rushing software to completion (such as the motto in open source - release early, release often) often leads to rapid application development, but unfortunately comes at the cost of poor software design. The larger software projects get, the more difficult it is in finding a replacement developer, the more expensive training becomes and the mroe likely your developer will just quit on you...
I said, that in my experience (which I was not lying) 50-85% of developer activity is spent on technical support (assuming your shop has developers handle this) and debugging/patching software with only 50% (at best) of developer resources actually being spent on productivity/enhancements/features/etc...
The sales pitch is that I aim to reduce that percentage to less than 15% (admittedly I was being optimistic - but it's a sale pitch not a confessional).
As a rough estimate I have worked for a little over a dozen different small/medium sized software companies (50,000-100,000 SLOC) over a ten year span (primarily in PHP) and worked on say 100 different open source/closed source software applications.
What have your experiences been? Would you agree? Would you say I've had a bad experience? More importantly, if you feel my experience has been poor and yours was not, would you mind explaining what you feel made the difference? Was it software design/principles that made a difference and would you care to give me a reference (name, email and quoted statement on what made the difference?)...
Cheers