SunkCostDrivenArchitecture

Martin Fowler recently posted about a architectural style he calls SunkCostDrivenArchitecture.



Your company buys some very expensive piece of infrastructure software. You are then told you must use it on a project even if it's not suitable for the project and causes you extra effort After paying all that money for it you don't want it to go to waste do you?



This made me think of another related architectural pattern I've seen, it may have a formal name but I don't know it, so I just made this up:



UglyCousinArchitecture: Your company has developed a technology that does X. Your told you must use X even if it's not suitable for the project.



A related pattern to the UglyCousingArchticture is what I call the SameNameArchitecture:



SameNameArchitecture: Your company has developed a technology X that contains a word Z in its name. Your new project requirements indicated a need for a technology Y that also contains Z in its name. Every manager and many architects above you will assume technology X will do the job of technology Y because they have the same word Z in their name.



This last one has been a constant pain in my side. On IBM/Lotus Workplace I work on the e-mail routing infrastructure and we have some technology in the router's persistence layer we've called 'the mail queue' since our initial specifications. You wouldn't believe the number of times I've had to explain to folks why this isn't using MQ.






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