[antonhag]

> I'm currently building a skyscraper on the foundations of a bikeshed.

Not sure if you are joking or not, but I often hear similar things and I believe that it misses the point. What constitutes a good foundation in software is very subjective - and just saying "foundation bad" does not help a non-technical person understand _why_ it is bad.

It's better to point at that one small rock (some ancient perl-script that no-one longer understands) which holds up the entire thing. Which might be fine until someone needs to move that rock. Or something surrounding it.

[scott_w]

I like this thinking because it's a true reflection of how things work. I strongly doubt any housebuilder goes back to the architect and says "can't do that, foundations bad." They'd explain what the problem is: maybe the design is rated to a certain weight/height, or what's in the ground composition that prevents the requested changes.

We should do the same in software engineering. What exactly in our design (e.g. that Perl script that's running half the operation that we need to investigate) is stopping us?

[tough]

xkcd: Dependency

https://xkcd.com/2347/