Overview
Software Organization Simulation puts you in the seat of a CIO, CTO or Head of Engineering. You steer a software organisation through ordinary business pressure for a while — and then through a full-blown Legacy System Modernization (LSM) Challenge: the kind of moment where market expectations, a regulatory deadline and the departure of your last domain expert all hit at once.
There are no "correct" moves, only consequences. Every action you take, every quarter that passes, and every strategy you commit to shapes what becomes possible later.
How a quarter works
- Check your dashboard: the "At a glance" bars for a quick read, or expand "Full dashboard" for the complete picture.
- Pick actions in "Options this quarter" — together they must not exceed your Effective Delivery Capacity for this quarter (shown in the sticky header, which stays visible while you scroll).
- Hire or let go team members any time — this doesn't use delivery capacity, only Budget (hiring) or an immediate Knowledge/Satisfaction hit (letting go).
- Click End quarter. The game resolves, in order: your actions, systemic drift (debt, knowledge, satisfaction, …), any random event, and — once triggered — the LSM Challenge's own rules.
- Read the quarter report (and "Show details" for the full breakdown), then continue.
Team & capacities
There's no fixed maximum team size. What matters is whether your team brings enough of three separate capacities:
| Role | Delivery | Complexity | Leadership | Relative cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Senior | 5 | 5 | +3 | 5 |
| Professional | 4 | 3 | +1 | 3 |
| Junior | 2 | 1 | −2 | 1 |
- Delivery Capacity — how much action-point budget your team has each quarter.
- Complexity Capacity — how much technical/domain complexity your team can master, compared against the project's Required Complexity Capacity. Falling short here is the single biggest driver of technical debt.
- Leadership Capacity — the team's ability to coach and lead itself. Teams larger than 5 people accrue Coordination Load (−1 per extra person), which is subtracted to get Effective Leadership Capacity.
New hires onboard over 1–3 quarters (depending on role) at reduced productivity before contributing fully.
Effective Delivery Capacity
Your nominal Delivery Capacity is adjusted by four multipliers, which are averaged (not multiplied) into one combined factor:
- Leadership — from Effective Leadership Capacity (0.65×–1.10×)
- Satisfaction & Wellbeing — team mood (0.70×–1.10×)
- Delivery Performance — your DORA index (0.60×–1.05×)
- Efficiency & Flow — Complexity Capacity vs. what's required (0.55×–1.10×)
Averaging means one weak dimension won't crush your whole quarter the way four multiplied factors would — but all four are still worth keeping healthy, since the average only reaches 1.0×+ when most of them are in good shape.
Core resources
- Business Value — the benefit the system generates. Drives your quarterly Budget income and is one win condition (> 80).
- Budget — grows by 25% of Business Value minus team upkeep (50% of role costs) each quarter. Also moved by hiring costs, action costs, dual-run costs during the Challenge, TCO recovery once modernisation progresses, regulatory fines, and random events. Every cause is shown directly in the quarter log, not just the net change — it's usually your tightest constraint.
- Customer Satisfaction — drifts toward the average of Business Value and Delivery Performance; SLA breaches and incidents pull it down directly. Win condition: > 75.
- Technical Debt — grows from complexity gaps, time pressure, leadership deficits and low reliability; at 100 the game ends immediately. Win condition: < 30.
- Time Pressure — falls by 4 automatically each quarter, rises from shipping features and business events. High time pressure feeds technical debt.
- Knowledge — reduces Required Complexity Capacity. Built by Documentation, Coaching and AI analysis; lost through attrition, time pressure and the Challenge's personnel force.
- Architecture Quality — rises when Complexity Capacity comfortably covers what's required, falls when it doesn't. Win condition: > 70.
- AI Insight — relieves Required Complexity Capacity, capped at 20% relief.
DORA & SPACE dashboard
Team Morale, Stability and "Complexity Coverage" have been replaced by the same metric families used in real engineering organisations:
DORA — Delivery Performance
Deployment Frequency, Lead Time Score, Reliability Score and Recovery Speed, averaged into a Delivery Performance Index. Improved by Refactoring, Modernisation, and rising Test Coverage / Cloud-Native Maturity; damaged by incidents and outages.
SPACE — Developer Experience
Satisfaction & Wellbeing, Performance, Activity, Communication & Collaboration, and Efficiency & Flow. Satisfaction responds to Coaching and team events; Communication & Collaboration only rises (via Documentation) and never decays on its own; Efficiency & Flow is the same Complexity Capacity vs. Required ratio from before, just under its SPACE name.
Leadership Capacity stays separate from both families — it's not part of DORA or SPACE, it remains its own, team-composition-driven mechanic.
The LSM Challenge
From quarter 1, the dashboard shows a countdown: a classic Legacy System Modernization challenge is coming, by default in quarter 5.
Postponing
You can postpone the trigger by up to 2 quarters, one at a time. Each postponement raises a severity multiplier (+18% per quarter delayed) that scales up the challenge's complexity pressure — and turns what would have been a softened personnel-force knowledge loss into a guaranteed, hard 25-point hit.
The trigger — three forces at once
- Market — permanently raises Required Complexity Capacity.
- Regulatory — sets a deadline: by the challenge's 3rd quarter, at least 20% of functionality must be migrated, or a fine hits Budget and Business Value.
- Personnel — your last domain expert retires. If not postponed and your Knowledge was already ≥ 70, the loss is small (−5); otherwise it's a harder −15 (or a guaranteed −25 if you postponed).
The challenge itself
Always exactly 6 quarters, whenever it starts. At the beginning you must lock in one modernisation strategy — binding for the whole challenge, confirmed explicitly since it can't be changed afterwards.
Modernisation strategies
Named after the industry-standard "R" strategies, ordered from least to most transformative:
- Rehost (Lift & Shift) — fastest migration progress of all, but doesn't improve Architecture Quality, Technical Debt or Reliability on its own. Fast, cheap, doesn't solve the underlying problem.
- Refactor (Strangler Fig) — steady, incremental progress with lower risk; legacy and new components coexist for a while (dual-run cost).
- Re-architect (Event-Driven / Microservices) — slower start while the event backbone is built, then the best long-term Deployment Frequency and Architecture Quality.
- Replace — Big Bang Rewrite — no per-quarter migration action; progress builds invisibly in the background and only resolves in a single high-stakes cutover at the end. Succeed and you jump straight to fully migrated; fail and it's a costly rollback.
- Replace — Buy / Repurchase — fast progress via a vendor/standard solution, but integration fit gaps add some technical debt along the way.
Winning & losing
The game ends immediately (a loss) if Delivery Performance collapses to 0, Technical Debt reaches 100, or your team is reduced to zero people.
Otherwise, the game ends once the LSM Challenge's 6 quarters are over. You win if you meet at least 5 of these 7 conditions:
- Business Value > 80
- Technical Debt < 30
- Delivery Performance Index > 75
- Knowledge > 60
- Architecture Quality > 70
- Customer Satisfaction > 75
- LSM Challenge completed (≥ 90% migrated)
Tips
- Every dashboard metric's info icon (ⓘ) explains not just what it means, but how to move it — hover or tap it before guessing.
- Build Knowledge above 70 before the Challenge triggers if you can — it softens the personnel-force knowledge cliff considerably.
- Postponing buys preparation time, but it's not free: weigh the severity increase and the hardened knowledge cliff against what you can actually achieve with the extra quarters.
- Refactoring and Modernisation actions are worth doing before the Challenge, not just during it — they raise the Test Coverage & Cloud-Native Maturity that quietly feed your DORA scores every quarter.
- Dual-run costs (Refactor, Re-architect, Buy/Repurchase strategies) are a recurring drain, not a one-off — don't let active legacy/new interfaces pile up.
- Big Bang hides all its progress until the final cutover — if you choose it, keep Efficiency & Flow healthy going into the last challenge quarter, since that's what decides success or failure alongside the hidden progress.