[thelist] Enterprise Red Tape was: Web Based Employee Directory- prt 2

Ken Schaefer ken at adOpenStatic.com
Thu Sep 16 08:18:44 CDT 2004


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ken Chase" <raskenbo at fastmail.fm>
Subject: Re: [thelist] Enterprise Red Tape was: Web Based Employee 
Directory- prt 2


: OK Ken, you've made your point, and a good one at that. However, what I
: got out of Ron's message was that technology is not the core competency
: of most companies. If a company developing OS's doesn't find
: efficiencies in OS development, they'll be out of business. So this will
: be a priority for them.
:
: If the chef at the local five star restaurant (to use a silly analogy)
: isn't efficient at applying "code re-use" to the in-house inventory
: management system that he's developing in his spare time, it's still
: business as usual.

Absolutely.

But Ron did say that "Have you folks *really* seen this happen? Dramatic_ 
cost reductions directly attributable to code re-use? Personally, I think 
this benefit has been drastically oversold to management."

The Chef at the local five star restaurant probably doesn't need to sell 
anything to management :-) Additionally, the Chef probably isn't developing 
anything complex.

Code reuse doesn't save much in development time, especially with a single 
developer. Code Reuse dramatically reduces your maintenance costs.

Just like using a central, external CSS file allows you to rapidly change, 
say, the font used in your site (compared to inline <font> tags), OOP let 
you rapidly change what your application does.

Now, OOP is much more complex than writing some vbscript file, or a batch 
file. And you need the relevant competancies to fully exploit it. Just like 
a beginner/amateur electrician is probably going to cause themselves more 
grief than good, attempting to develop a robust n-tier, OOP application is 
probably fraught with danger if you don't know what you're doing.

Cheers
Ken



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