The financial people recognize that in most cases the value of an investment degrades over the time. If you pay $1M for new machinery, it will be worth lot less

The financial people recognize that in most cases the value of an investment degrades over the time. If you pay $1M for new machinery, it will be worth lot less after five years. In software we should have similar mentality and we should somehow turn this into numbers. If you don't touch your environment, the value keeps on going down - until it reaches zero. In order to keep the value, you need to constantly work on the environment. Patch operating, upgrade libraries, upgrade frameworks. Each time you do a quick'n'dirty thing, you essentially increase your liabilities. Refactoring equals to decreasing those liabilities. If you would put numbers for these, you could actually create a balance sheet every year for your software.