Is micro-strangulation underway within OSS?

Yesterday’s post spoke of how the accumulation of features was limiting us to small, incremental change.

The diagram below re-tells that story:
The increasing percentage of tech debt

You’ve probably noticed that microservices are the big buzz in our industry. They’re perceived as being the big white hope for our future. I have my reservations though.

If you’re at t0 in the chart above, microservices allow for rapid rollout of features, whole small-grid architectures even (in a Lean / MVP world). My reservations stem from the propensity for rapid release of microservices to amplify the accumulation of tech debt (ie the escalation of maintenance and testing in the chart above). They have the potential to take organisations to t0+100 really quickly.

The upside though is that replacement or re-factoring of smaller modules (ie microservices) should be easier than the change-out of monolithic software suites. The one caveat… we have to commit to a culture of subtraction projects being as important as feature releases.

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2 Responses

  1. Totally agree about subtraction projects – it should be inbuilt into the behaviour and where appropriate, into KPIs and performance targets.

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