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What the report names mean
Metrics are the names the report prints. Patterns are grouped by the part of the company that owns the overspend: Business, Product, or Tech.
Metrics
- Vacuum Effort
- Sync tax
- Domain coupling
- Failure risk cost
- Incident cost
- Failure risk multiplier
- Loaded hourly rate
- What your engineers actually had to do
Patterns
Business
- Scaling the Inefficient System
- Premature Capital Scaling an Inefficient System
- Headcount as a Substitute for Architecture
- Tolerating Architectural Embezzlement
- Treating Coordination Meetings as Productivity
- Choosing Trust Over Structural Metrics
- Valuing Feature Count Over Margins
- Greenlighting One Feature Without Seeing the Sync Layer Cost
- Approving Interfaces Without Seeing Coupling Cost
Product
- Planning in Non-Convertible Currencies
- Failing to Shield Teams from Architectural Embezzlement
- Measuring PMs Only on Shipped Features
- Tracking Vanity Metrics Over Economic Indicators
- Prioritizing Speed Over Long-Term Viability
- Prioritizing Shipping Speed Over Coupling Discipline
- Skipping Interface Reviews That Quantify Coupling
- Architectural Decisions Without Cost Attribution
- Goals Set on Shipping Activity Not Economic Outcomes
Tech
- Interdependent Architecture Maintained Through Scale
- Accumulation of "Temporary" Sync Solutions
- Failing to Translate Complexity into Business Language
- Reaching Into Foreign Domains to Ship Faster
- Letting Temporary Sync Measures Become Permanent
- Failing to Measure Architecture in Human and Economic Terms
- Integrated Architecture Held Past Its Phase
- Meetings Held Instead of Interfaces Redesigned
- Communicating Complexity as Jargon
- Not Translating Complexity into Business Terms
- Coupled Architecture Without Independent Modules
- Borrowing Against Future Capacity to Pay for Current Delivery
- Reporting What Shipped Instead of What the System Became
- Accumulating Sync Debt Across Services
- Burying Sync Cost in Engineering Overhead
- Not Measuring Interdependence as a Cost Multiplier
- Failing to Translate Architecture Into Economics
- Failing to Translate Complexity into Economic Language
- Letting Connascence Degree Drift Without Tracking
- Designing Interfaces Without Modeling Coordination Cost
Measure the overspending. Then change what made it expensive.
Defusor is in its testing phase: free for a few Series B or C SaaS companies, in exchange for feedback.