Calculating Costs: Building on the Work of Others

Thud.

A project plan for a new customer data warehouse is dropped on your desk. The project is split into phases, each of which includes several smaller jobs. Each of those jobs involves coming up with a piece of the overall system: a tool to create bar charts, a grid that can calculate basic sales summaries, a point-and-click query builder to ask questions of the database and so on.

None of those tasks is rocket science, especially for an experienced programmer. You can whip those babies off over several weeks. But should you?

Deciding whether to build or buy isn't cut-and-dried. Many variables go into the calculation, including whether the programming expertise exists on staff. One company facing deadline pressures might buy components, while another might opt to build them in order to reuse the code without additional license fees.

Baseline has created a chart that walks you through the costs to build and to buy application add-ons; it uses function points as the basis of comparison. To download a digital version of this chart, which includes a translation grid of 26 programming languages, click the "Tool" icon above.

To learn more about function points, go to www.ifpug.org.

Copyright © 2004 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in Baseline.