The Kitchen Analogy

Think of a software company like a restaurant. The goal of the restaurant is simple: serve customers satisfying meals, on time, safely. Similarly, software exists to deliver value to its users, reliably and efficiently.

In a restaurant, the kitchen staff are the experts. They know the equipment, the ingredients, the recipes, and the hygiene standards. They know what needs to be cleaned, what needs replacing, and when. The front-of-house staff (management, waiters, or customers) may not understand these details, but the kitchen team does. Their expert judgment is trusted and expected.

Software engineers are like the kitchen staff. They are the experts of the codebase. They understand where the code is fragile, where technical debt has accumulated, and where refactoring or testing is required. When an engineer says a section of code needs attention, it is not an excuse to “play around”. It is an expert opinion about maintaining the health of the system.

A restaurant has time between services to clean the kitchen, restock ingredients, and perform preventive maintenance on equipment. Without this dedicated maintenance time, the kitchen will degrade: knives get dull, workspace runs full with dirty dishes and leftovers, hygiene slips, and mistakes increase. In software, if engineers never get time to clean, refactor, or update the codebase, technical debt piles up, bugs proliferate, and development slows down. Just as a dirty kitchen can lead to food poisoning, a neglected codebase can produce critical bugs that reach users.

Unfortunately, the software development does not follow service hours like a restaurant does. This can create a sense of urgency that there are always customers waiting impatiently for new features to be shipped. Estimates are taken as deadlines and dedicated maintenance tasks have a tendency to get deprioritized and descoped or postponed.

In a healthy restaurant, cleaning and maintenance are part of the job. They do not require approval from stakeholders. Likewise, maintaining the code should be a normal, ongoing responsibility of the development team, not something that has to be “scheduled” as a special innovation week or justified to management. If the kitchen staff knows it needs cleaning, it gets done. If developers know a module needs refactoring, it should get done. The experts know best.