I stumbled across this quote from Mary Shaw.

Less than 10% of the code has to do with the ostensible purpose of the system; the rest deals with input-output, data validation, data structure maintenance, and other housekeeping.

I don’t know the context of her quote, but she could be talking about any software project.

When I began working as a professional programmer, I was surprised that I spent most of my time on work that wasn’t directly related to what I wanted to accomplish. Computer science classes and writing software for my own research had not prepared me for this. I kept thinking that as I got more experience, the proportion of my effort going directly toward what I wanted to accomplish would increase. It did, but very slowly, and never by very much. Only later did the reason occur to me: the vast majority of the work that needs to be done isn’t directly related to the purpose of the project.

People who know a little bit about programming can make difficult clients because they can imagine how they might write the core 10% (or maybe core 2%) of a large project.

Every once in a while someone will claim to have a solution that will change things. They’re selling a framework, a language, etc. that will radically change things. The sales pitch is “You spend most of your time doing low-level stuff. Use my product and your programmers can focus on the value-added part and not do so much plumbing.” But plumbing is value-added work. (Call it “infrastructure” if you like; that sounds more important.) Sometimes plumbing work becomes repetitive and can be reduced by reusing code, but there’s always new plumbing to work on. Most of the work to be done is invisible and I don’t foresee this changing any time soon.

Update: See this list of non-functional requirements by Mike Griffiths. This list gives some specific examples of where development effort goes, things that must be done but are not obvious until you mention them.