Of course something should be gained, but that doesn't mean you can always tell how much would be or was. There is no mature "actuarial science" of software de

Of course something should be gained, but that doesn't mean you can always tell how much would be or was. There is no mature "actuarial science" of software development. The market can provide concrete pricing for new feature development; engineers can't tell you how many dollars of tech debt you're in or give three significant digits on the probability of a major outage tomorrow. That doesn't make money/risk/time costs which are difficult to measure any less real and it doesn't make them smaller than the ones which are easy KPIs. Nor can you necessarily look at the movement of measurable KPIs and say "man, that rewrite was a waste of money." Who's to say things wouldn't have been worse without it?