Your software development approach is too expensive and too brittle

Most software teams are not struggling because software is inherently chaotic. They are struggling because they are paying enormous amounts of money to keep the wrong machine barely usable. That sounds dramatic. It is not. In fact, it is one of the most normal things in modern software development. A lot of systems are built in ways that are: more expensive than they need to be, more fragile than they need to be, harder to change than they need to be, and harder to reason about than they need to be. And yet they still get called “well architected.” Why? Because in software, there is usually no comparison case. No control group. No alternate implementation. No tractor parked next to the Ferrari. So if the thing eventually works, the architecture often gets promoted from merely functional to supposedly good. That is one of the deepest blind spots in software engineering. And it is how teams end up trying to plow fields with a Ferrari F40. The Ferrari and the tractor Imagine you need to p