I wonder if there is a quantifiable relationship between the Time-to-market requirement for applications and their Half-life.

Assume that the time-to-market for application A is 3 months; and that the time-to-market for application B is 6 months. Could you then assume that the half-life of application A will be shorter than that if application B? i.e. you should be looking to re-design (and possibly re-write some or all of) application A sooner than application B?

I believe that application architects should consider half-life of their applications as a first-class notion. However, I have rarely seen this being considered or called-out.

The recent interest in VB6 code bases triggered this dormant thought - what do you think?