This provides a much more nuanced background for decisions about making investments with a longer expected payoff.
I have in mind here examples like model checking, such as with TLA+, and choosing languages like LISP or Haskell over Java or Python. Often these things are viewed by management as a question of whether to get to market sooner or later, with vague promises of correctness and maintainability if they accept the delay.
Putting the conversation on the capital footing makes it a lot easier to have these kinds of discussions, including from a testing standpoint—it is much clearer to me now how I might approach trying to tell what kind of benefit a project would get out of model checking or different language paradigms. In particular, I think ‘ease of implementing a new feature in mature software’ is an interesting one that I never considered explicitly before.
This provides a much more nuanced background for decisions about making investments with a longer expected payoff.
I have in mind here examples like model checking, such as with TLA+, and choosing languages like LISP or Haskell over Java or Python. Often these things are viewed by management as a question of whether to get to market sooner or later, with vague promises of correctness and maintainability if they accept the delay.
Putting the conversation on the capital footing makes it a lot easier to have these kinds of discussions, including from a testing standpoint—it is much clearer to me now how I might approach trying to tell what kind of benefit a project would get out of model checking or different language paradigms. In particular, I think ‘ease of implementing a new feature in mature software’ is an interesting one that I never considered explicitly before.