The costs of a mistake
- Ready:
13/Aug 2026
- Posted:
2/Sept 2026
- reading-time:
59 sec
- LinkedIn:
A typical code bug takes between one hour and one week to solve. Annoying, but the costs are minor — a few thousand euros at most. Sure, a bug escaping your sprint is a bit more expensive. And once it hits production, it can increase sevenfold.
But what about an architectural mistake? Let’s be honest: it is just as easy to make. Just a few lines in a 256-page document. But if it’s a real architectural error, it is fundamentally wrong! Let us take a trivial example: choosing the (wrong) programming environment for a new, modern Embedded System. That can be the OS, the language, or an open-source library. And yes, those mistakes have been made …
Here is an untold story: after 300 man-years of effort, it simply didn’t work! It never will.
The only solution was to adjust one single paragraph in the initial architecture; maybe an hour’s
work. But it implied throwing everything away, mourning the loss, and starting all over again.
Slightly more expensive!
What does that teach us?
Sometimes small details are really important. For the product you work on, and for your career!
Surely, haste is never a great driver. I wouldn’t welcome a delay of a few initial sprints when I’m leading from the process-axis. But when I have to choose between taking 2 extra weeks to get the architecture bug-free, and burning 300 man-years, it’s an easy choice.