Why Skipping a Redesign Looks Cheaper
Why does the cost of not redesigning disappear from the estimate?
The estimate includes the feature and, if someone proposes a redesign, that redesign cost too. The number goes up, so the redesign gets rejected. Future coordination, incidents from interdependence, engineer churn, recruitment, and slower delivery have no line item. They hit the budget years later, disconnected from the decision that caused them.
What is operational Big O?
Big O describes how an algorithm's cost grows with input size. The operational version uses the number of interdependent modules as the input, and coordination cost is what grows. Clean interfaces keep that growth closer to linear. Undefined interfaces push it toward quadratic. The architecture that is cheap at two modules becomes the primary cost at fifty, because interdependence was never measured as the exponent.
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