RFR-2026-011: Lifecycle cost and return-on-investment model

Research opportunity

Measure whether FE's quality gains, if any, exceed learning, documentation, coordination, and maintenance costs.

Background

The program discusses usefulness but lacks an economic or operational cost model.

Origin documents and trace

• research/evaluations/FE-BOUNDARY-2026-07-28/RP-FE-BOUNDARY-2026-07-28.md, section: F7; Decision record
• research/theory/theory-of-framework-engineering-v0.1.md, section: Open Questions
• research/operating-system/edr/research-efficiency-metrics.md, section: research efficiency metrics

Specific assumption challenged: Improved traceability is worth the profile's added process burden.

Supporting evidence: No matched utility experiment or net-benefit evidence exists; current confidence in incremental utility is very low.

Unknowns

• Adoption cost
• Maintenance burden
• Break-even conditions and opportunity cost

Dependencies

• RFR-2026-003

Suggested REP and methodology

Create REP-2026-011. Instrument the matched experiment and later field pilots for labor, elapsed time, rework, defects, decision reversals, and maintenance; estimate sensitivity across usage scales.

Expected outputs

• Cost taxonomy
• ROI model
• Break-even analysis

Success criteria

The model reports uncertainty and includes scenarios where FE has negative value.

Execution recommendation

• Recommended agent: research-economics agent
• Estimated effort: medium
• Expected knowledge gained: Converts efficacy into adoption-relevant evidence.
• Frontier Score: 185
• Score inputs: knowledge gain 4/5; impact 4/5; cross-project reuse 4/5; scientific importance 3/5; dependency cost 4/5; implementation difficulty 3/5.
• Score calculation: 4 × 4 × 4 × 3 − 4 − 3 = 185.
• Score status: structured expert judgment, not measured utility.