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SunkCostDrivenArchitecture

Very true words from Martin Fowler:

"I find this to be a sadly common architectural style. Your company buys some very expensive piece of infrastructure software. You are then told you must use it on a project even if it's not suitable for the project and causes you extra effort. After paying all that money for it you don't want it to go to waste do you?"

2 Comments

  • Unfortunately Martin's not aware of the sunk cost fallacy. Just because it causes some extra developer work doesn't mean that it costs the company more money overall. If force-fitting the software with some extra development coding is less expensive than some other implementation, it is still the correct business decision, no matter how much the developers don't like it.

  • That is if "the business" really had a good look at the different options available. My experience is that sometimes it's the wrong people taking decision on what software/system to buy and build on. The result may then be that you end up with a platform or software infrastructure that is both very expensive, difficult to extend and in the worst case cannot even _be_ extended or modified to fit your business purposes.

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