Kill It with Fire: Manage Aging Computer Systems (and Future Proof Modern Ones)

by Marianne Bellotti

They had a choice: slow down the bus or wait for the wheels to fall off the bus.

Engineering organizations that maintain a separation between operations and development, for example, inevitably find that their development teams design solutions so that when they go wrong, they impact the operations team first and most severely. Meanwhile, their operations team builds processes that throw barriers in front of development, passing the negative consequences of that to those teams.

Failure is inevitable when attempting to change complex systems in production. There are too many moving parts, too many unknowns, and too much that needs to be fixed. Getting every single decision right is impossible.

Ultimately, old software cannot be used as a specification for a new version.