Investment or Debt?

I first told the following story on my blog in April 2009:[49]

Some businesses think software is a write-once activity. It is true that once written software does not change, but the world around us does and static software quickly becomes out of date.

Code rot is real. Even if a system was well written at one time we often cannot anticipate how a system will need to be changed in the future. And that’s the good news! If software does not need to be changed then it probably isn’t being used. We’d like the software we build to be used and for software to continue to provide value it must be easy to change.

You can build a house out of cardboard and on a nice summer day it will hold up well but in the first rainstorm it’ll ...

Get Beyond Legacy Code now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.