Software Modernization Consultants

CISQ's 2022 report estimates accumulated technical debt in U.S. software at about $1.52 trillion. Two modernization cases show the cost at small-company scale: $48K to $8.7K a month, and $37K to under $2K a month.

Modernization is work on software that has fallen behind its supported versions or its structure. CISQ's 2022 report estimates the cost of poor software quality in the U.S. at no less than $2.41 trillion, with about $1.52 trillion of that in accumulated technical debt.

The two cases below are from companies of 1 to 10 people, with client names replaced by Company A and Company B.

Company A paid a team of five engineers about $48K a month while the lead engineer rewrote the whole app from scratch, telling the owner that Angular could not scale and the app was too buggy to stabilize. The app was five Angular versions behind, and the team was writing Angular as if it were plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

I spent a month fixing bugs and stabilizing the existing app, with no rewrite, and upgraded Angular to the current version. As the app stabilized, the owner let the other engineers go. Engineering cost fell from $48K to $8.7K a month, and ongoing maintenance and new features now cost under $4K a month.

Company B's first version cost about $15K but was so buggy it could not deliver key features, so a team of American contractors rewrote it. That second version cost about $37K a month for three years, about $1.3M in total, and was still unstable and unmaintainable. Both versions had no proper application architecture.

Repairing the second version would have cost more than rebuilding it. I rebuilt the backend and frontend over 14 months and kept about a quarter of the existing code. Maintenance dropped below $8K a month, then to under $2K a month.