When to Build and When to Buy

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

Agenda
Motivation
Understand the business problem and your business needs
Business problem becomes an engineering problem
Cost of Building
When to Build
Cost of Buying
When to Buy
Tips for Building Quickly
Q&A

Motivation
Resource constrained in an organization – don’t want to waste money or time, especially during a recession!
Need insight into your data or automate a repetitive process
1. Build software solution yourself
2. Buy software solution: shrink wrapped, web service, contractor, consultants
Expose the tradeoffs associated with each of these choices.
Bridge both the business and engineering issues

Questions to answer to understand the business problem and your needs
What are you requirements?
What is that you are trying to get done?
e.g. measure user issues, marketing emails, data aggregation
What are you costs?
Cost per user, scale, security, and reliability
Time to market
Easy to get sucked into a sales pitch.
Anticipate need because contracts are based on usage

Understand how the business problem translates to an engineering problem
e.g. tool to track metrics or keep track of user issues, mail server is a business need that satisfies customers needs.
Engineering problems:
Maintenance: users will experience new problems that must be tracked,
Scale: it will become slow as the number of users grow
Security: it will need to be hosted on a secure server if it contains user specific or sensitive data
A mail server or any hardware solution has similar issues:
Cost of configuration
Reliability & backups
Graceful failover
Given how business problems turn into engineering problems it might seem like a feat to build and maintain than buy.

Cost of Building
List of features you want to build and have a functional spec
Hand off spec to developers to scope and break down
Breakdown of developers time:
New technology (e.g Flex, iPhone app, etc.) requires ramp up
Designing – features, database schema, and where it should be housed if it is a full app
Developing & Testing
Deploying and ongoing maintenance or optimizations if it sucks a lot of system resources!
Similar to regular release cycle!

When to Build
Build the tool once you spot the need and include it into a product release cycle
Benefits of building:
In house developers have a vested interest.
Understand the problem and requirements and how it fits in with the rest of the business.
Investing time to learn a new technology or framework can then be leverage in future projects.
Drawback: takes time away from developing product features.

Cost of Buying
Hiring a contractor
Understand the business needs, and be aware of the technology
Integrate code into your current system, may require additional APIs, understand data architecture
Need to be managed.
Working on multiple projects, less responsiveness, and focused on speed.
Code quality, maintainability, and addressing security issues.
Developers have to maintain the tool after the contractor is done.
Buying packaged software or software as a service
Limits options to what is built. Pay for enhancements. You will have to keep an ongoing relationship.
You will still need to assign a developer or product manager to communicating the needs of the project.
Web service reliability.
Want to assess quality of the data you are receiving

When to Buy
Hire a contractor: when limited by number of developers or by their skill set
Software Consultants
Benefits of establishing an ongoing relationship:
Consultants have spent a lot of time learning a particular field such as web security, databases, or data warehousing
They keep up with the latest trends in industry
Do research on the side, and publish papers
Large customer base, they will have had a lot of experiences that make them good problem solvers
In house developers who have only been looking at a single code base for a few years.

When to Buy
Benefits of establishing an ongoing relationship continued:
Bring in a consultant to educate your team.
The consultants solve problems and provide resources.
Your developers implement the solution.
Builds up your team's knowledge base
In house developers become responsible for of building, but know how to maintain it!

Tips for Building Quickly
Java is slow!
For pulling data or getting metrics Python is a good solution
Create a reusable template for UI development
YUI has a lot of good UI components
FreeMarker is faster for HTML development
Try open source or free product like
e.g. Google Analytics

When to Build and When to Buy

by Poornima Vijayashanker

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