You could take it to another level too. It's technical debt, that accrues interest that if you don't change the components of the system, even if they become older and broken, over time it becomes harder and harder to modify or change the system so that in effect the longer you don't change the core components, the more you have to spend in total to maintain the legacy system to the point where the total time to actually replace the core components is less than it would have taken to replace the system had you not earlier, because of customisation and tight coupling etc. I have seen this taken to the extreme where these components live way beyond their supported life. At this point you're effectively paying the total cost of ownership and support of the system components and the customisations. If it's not open source you may be out of luck from any vendors, who would refuse to support the components unless you upgrade.
You could take it to another level too. It's technical debt, that accrues interest that if you don't change the components of the system, even if they become older and broken, over time it becomes harder and harder to modify or change the system so that in effect the longer you don't change the core components, the more you have to spend in total to maintain the legacy system to the point where the total time to actually replace the core components is less than it would have taken to replace the system had you not earlier, because of customisation and tight coupling etc. I have seen this taken to the extreme where these components live way beyond their supported life. At this point you're effectively paying the total cost of ownership and support of the system components and the customisations. If it's not open source you may be out of luck from any vendors, who would refuse to support the components unless you upgrade.
- when you release an API without a single byte of documentation and suddenly everyone is reaching out to you asking to explain how it works
hey David,
I enjoyed reading this post.
- NK