| > And many of those costs have a nasty tendency to remain hidden until they suddenly don't, and at that point, people often already expended inordinate amounts of resources on them. Any business that employs software developers knows exactly how much it costs to employ them. If that math doesn’t work then the software developers loose their jobs. This basically establishes a baseline for “value” that must be delivered, at minimum. Above the baseline, software devs are left to their own devices: There will be no hard accounting of weather development effort is “worth it”, rather it’ll mostly be about whether people feel like it was. (This is sort of the origin of “too much money spoils things”.) As long as the effort doesn’t destroy everything, it can be argued that it was a success! So, the “hidden” costs are actually “bearable costs” because the business is just fine. The costs are “revealed” only when they’re no longer bearable. Ironically, well designed software “hides” the costs much longer than poorly designed, so what is missing is that we don’t have a great way of assigning value to in-house developed software that “just works”. Developers don’t even really think about it much because they get paid for writing code. I think that’s why the advice… > Use what already exists … becomes very hard, in practice, for devs to follow, even though it’s excellent advice. It’s a problem for management to solve. |