1. When to Build and When to Buy October 4, 2009 PoornimaVijayashanker Software Engineer – Mint.com Blog: Femgineer.com Contact: poornima82@gmail.com

3. Understand the business problem and your business needs

4. Business problem becomes an engineering problem

5. Cost of Building

6. When to Build

7. Cost of Buying

8. When to Buy

9. Tips for Building Quickly

11. Need insight into your data or automate a repetitive process

12. 1. Build software solution yourself

13. 2. Buy software solution: shrink wrapped, web service, contractor, consultants

14. Expose the tradeoffs associated with each of these choices.

16. What is that you are trying to get done?

17. e.g. measure user issues, marketing emails, data aggregation

18. What are you costs?

19. Cost per user, scale, security, and reliability

20. Time to market

21. Easy to get sucked into a sales pitch.

23. Engineering problems:

24. Maintenance: users will experience new problems that must be tracked,

25. Scale: it will become slow as the number of users grow

26. Security: it will need to be hosted on a secure server if it contains user specific or sensitive data

27. A mail server or any hardware solution has similar issues:

28. Cost of configuration

29. Reliability & backups

30. Graceful failover

33. Hand off spec to developers to scope and break down

34. Breakdown of developers time:

35. New technology (e.g Flex, iPhone app, etc.) requires ramp up

36. Designing – features, database schema, and where it should be housed if it is a full app

37. Developing & Testing

38. Deploying and ongoing maintenance or optimizations if it sucks a lot of system resources!

40. Benefits of building:

41. In house developers have a vested interest.

42. Understand the problem and requirements and how it fits in with the rest of the business.

43. Investing time to learn a new technology or framework can then be leverage in future projects.

45. Understand the business needs, and be aware of the technology

46. Integrate code into your current system, may require additional APIs, understand data architecture

47. Need to be managed.

48. Working on multiple projects, less responsiveness, and focused on speed.

49. Code quality, maintainability, and addressing security issues.

50. Developers have to maintain the tool after the contractor is done.

51. Buying packaged software or software as a service

52. Limits options to what is built. Pay for enhancements. You will have to keep an ongoing relationship.

53. You will still need to assign a developer or product manager to communicating the needs of the project.

54. Web service reliability.

56. Software Consultants

57. Benefits of establishing an ongoing relationship:

58. Consultants have spent a lot of time learning a particular field such as web security, databases, or data warehousing

59. They keep up with the latest trends in industry

60. Do research on the side, and publish papers

61. Large customer base, they will have had a lot of experiences that make them good problem solvers

63. Bring in a consultant to educate your team.

64. The consultants solve problems and provide resources.

65. Your developers implement the solution.

66. Builds up your team's knowledge base

68. For pulling data or getting metrics Python is a good solution

69. Create a reusable template for UI development

70. YUI has a lot of good UI components

71. FreeMarker is faster for HTML development

72. Try open source or free product like

73. e.g. Google Analytics