| I can build you a team using today's (quality: average B2B startup) programmers and today's methodologies that will write software for 40 years. It will just cost twice as much as the team that iterates quickly. It will cost more because I will spend more money on business analysis up front. I will spend more money writing automated tests. Most importantly, I will maintain my own toolchain and libraries or pay someone to do so. Every piece of software deployed will have someone accountable to my business to maintain it. It turns out that this is expensive. It's no more expensive than maintaining the COBOL code, mind you, and would likely give you better results than the equivalent COBOL code. Most companies will take their chances with less expensive software because that's what their competitors do. About a decade ago, I saw one of the major systems you talk about up close. While they spent that amount of money for mission-critical systems, they didn't do nearly as good of a job on the average software in the system. I'm not convinced that any business is ready to go back to the battle hardened days. |