cowanon44

I find Microsoft's 5 Pillars in their Well-Formed Architecture to be a useful way to explain this to non-technical people.

At the start of a project, fully focusing on your features makes sense. But as a project grows, non-functional concerns can sabotage the business model if not addressed.

- Reliability

- Security

- Cost optimization

- Performance Efficiency

- Operational Excellence

The first four have a direct impact on the customer. Buggy or insecure software, or excess costs, will all affect the customer directly.

The fifth point is about devops, and making sure that we can continuously (as a process) meet the customer's needs in all of these areas.

I've found that if I can fit refactoring into one of these pillars, it is much easier to explain to non-technical people. Of course, some people just can't be helped, and aren't open to alternate ways to think about software projects.

FWIW, Claude Opus (the paid model) gets the correct answer, and explains it well:

Based on the information provided, we cannot definitively determine whether cherries are better than bananas. The statements given only provide relative comparisons between apples and bananas, and apples and cherries, but do not directly compare cherries and bananas.

Here's what we know: 1. Apples are better than bananas. 2. Cherries are worse than apples.

However, these statements do not necessarily imply a transitive relation. In other words, just because A is better than B, and C is worse than A, it doesn't always mean that C is worse than B.

For example, if we assign numerical values to represent the quality of each fruit (higher numbers indicate better quality), we could have a scenario like this:

- Apples: 8 - Bananas: 6 - Cherries: 7

In this case, apples (8) are better than bananas (6), and cherries (7) are worse than apples (8), but cherries (7) are still better than bananas (6).

Therefore, more information would be needed to determine the relative quality of cherries compared to bananas.