“Should we build a new system, or enhance the existing system we already have?”

This is a common question we often face as consultants and developers, as developers our instinct is to always build something new.  A new system will enable us to use newer technologies, and to start fresh without any of the bugs or quirks of the old system.  In addition, building a new system is a lot more fun than maintenance patches for something that already exists.  Usually the inclination of management or the business is to keep and enhance an existing system by adding, especially when the cost and work effort to build a new system are considered.  I’d like to consider this question from a different angle, most discussions center on code complexity and system design, instead I’d like to focus on two issues which I believe are very relevant to this question, anchoring bias, and the idea of sunk costs.

Continue Reading 1 comment

As I was reading ‘The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo’ on my bus ride the other day, an unresolved computer defect (a.k.a bug) from work kept coming back to mind. I was constantly thinking on what I had tried already to diagnose this particular software defect and what I was going to try next. As I was jumping back and forth reading and thinking about this bug, the thought occurred to me that diagnosing and fixing a software defect is not a whole lot different than investigating a crime. Ok, I may be exaggerating, but I really think there are some commonalities in both situations. In the first installment of the Millennium Trilogy, the ‘Girl With The Dragon Tattoo’ Lisbeth Salander, a computer hacker joins journalist Michael Blomkvist to try to solve an unresolved missing person case. As a developer, I am often tasked to diagnose and fix software defects that were often created by someone else and in some cases have been in the application for ages. In this blog post I enumerate some similarities between diagnosing computer defects and investigating crimes. While solving defects is not life threatening (in most cases), there are certainly some commonalities.

Continue Reading 4 comments