Atrophy in Aging Systems: Evidence, Dynamics, and Antidote

Information systems age ungracefully. Once-modern systems aging into unmaintainable, buggy, meltdown-prone albatrosses is a widespread phenomenon that has received limited research attention. The received wisdom is that degenerative deterioration can be combated with refactoring or architectural improvements to their existing code. We conceptualize this phenomenon as system atrophy , and corroborate its existence by analyzing the code of over 1,300 systems as they underwent 19 million changes over 25 years. Such atrophy in systems has bread-and-butter consequences for organizations that rely on them. We show that it stunts the evolution of systems, makes them more bug-prone, and disengages developers. Atrophy in existing systems also makes it for organizations to implement other new systems because there are harder to integrate with them and cannibalize resources left over after their costlier upkeep. We then develop the idea that little increments in the modularity of their underlying code as a system evolves provide a powerful antidote to such atrophy. However, this antidote gradually loses its potency as a system ages further. Contrary to the popular belief, architectural improvements slow down atrophy but do not stop it. Our findings suggest that organizations must plan to eventually phase out these information systems, rather than just hoping to maintain them. For practice, we offer new insights on managing the tradeoff between evolution and atrophy; and how organizations can extract more useful life from aging systems. A pervasive, unbroached phenomenon is how once-modern systems age into unmaintainable albatrosses. We conceptualize this phenomenon from first-principles as system atrophy . We construct a trace data set from 190 million lines of evolving code in 1,354 systems spanning 25 years to corroborate it. Our middle-range theory introduces system atrophy into the conversation on information systems evolution, showing how small increments in modularity slow atrophy but lose potency with age. Atrophy eventually stunts systems, increases bugginess, and disengages developers. History: Yulin Fang, Senior Editor; Ning Su, Associate Editor. Funding: H. Safadi acknowledges support from the Terry-Sanford Research Award. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2023.1218 .