Pankowecki's essay Tracking dead code in Rails with Metrics kicked loose an idea that I've been meaning to write down.
We have programs that rely upon other programs; this service needs some capability provided by that service.
Riddle: what if we had a currency to express this relationship.
Part one: when A invokes a capability in B, accompanying that message is a bit of fictional currency to grease the wheels as it were. B starts tracking and reporting its income, both in the aggregate, and on a feature by feature basis.
Part two: if A expects to need some capability in B, then that capability can be reserved. The simplified version is the healthcheck that A uses to ensure the capabilities that it needs are available also includes a bit of grease, which can be tracked.
Rather than just flags that detect use and reservations, the fictional currency becomes a trackable representation of the business value flowing through the system.
Services can start publishing their own pricing - a landing page of capabilities advertises the associated transaction fees, which can scale up and down depending on demand.
In the large, your systems become an enormous bazaar of implementations competing for bids and haggling with one another.
