Well, green field projects usually enter maintenance(ish) mode fairly quickly, usually somewhere between three and six months in.

This isn't a bad thing, but rather a fact of life and so should be embraced and dealt with.

If they don't take on a more maintenance kind of style, it is because of a lack of one or more of:

• Short iterations (shorter than a month)
• Proper testing (and the resulting lack of code quality feedback)
• Deployment, or at least decent show-and-tell sessions with the stakeholders (and the resulting lack of design and requirements quality feedback)

/J