Cost of change
Cost of change is the time, effort, resources, expense, risk, or disruption required to modify and integrate a change to a system, product, process, or decision.
Architecture Modernization: Socio-technical alignment of software, strategy, and structure
Cost of change is the resources and time required to implement or execute a modification to a product, process, or system.
- How it is used
- Guides subdomain boundary and modernization investment decisions by relating change effort to expected change frequency.
- How deep it goes
- Explains code and team factors that raise change effort and offers a rate-of-change heuristic, without a quantitative measurement method.
- Examples
- Uses mobile.de’s platform-health decision and a Core Domain Chart discussion of an expensive order-management subdomain.
- What you can do after
- Evaluate/understand when to separate changing code or invest in reducing complexity, rather than treating every expensive system as a modernization priority.
Collaborative Software Design: How to facilitate domain modeling decisions
Cost of change is the effort, expense, risk, or disruption required to modify a software system after a decision has been made.
- How it is used
- Measures the significance of design decisions by considering their implementation cost and influence on software structure.
- How deep it goes
- Explains the definition and structural implications, but does not provide a detailed estimation method or calculation procedure.
- Examples
- Uses an integration name change and ticketing-system modernization for the “Anytime, Anywhere” campaign.
- What you can do after
- Evaluate design decisions by tracing implementation costs and potential effects on the system’s fundamental structure.
Related concepts
- functional excellenceaddressed by · Functional excellence is the ongoing work of maintaining existing artifacts, removing technical debt, and refactoring legacy to preserve platform quality.
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