Total Cost of Development and Developer Communities

The term total cost of ownership is frequently used to capture costs, sometimes forgotten, involved in owning a system. I've found useful to use the term total cost of development in a similar manner, capturing some of the less common contributors. Some of these costs are:

• Training
• Examples
• Support
• Risk of choosing the right solution

Training, examples and support should, ideally, be targetted to a the specific needs and background of the developer. Many people remember these contributors, but the last contributor is easy to overlook: when a developer chooses an approach to solve a problem (architecture, tools, platform, whatever) she is taking the risk that the approach may not be a good match to the problem. The mismatched approach may increase the cost of implementing the solution, or may even require a restart of the project.

There are other contributors to the TCD (tell me in the talk back), but what I find interesting is that all these costs are very well addressed by developer communities. The example that I often use is Struts . I don't want to minimize the technical benefits of Struts, but I believe that the main reason why Struts is so succesful is the very strong developer community built around the code which help reduce the tocal cost of development by addressing the contributors I mention above.

There are a number of developer communities, from our own Java.Net communities (I belong to the WS & XML and the jwsdp communities) to those provided by many vendors, includinng Microsoft.

Buiding a community is hard and takes time to build, but when they do a good job, they are extremely valuable. I think we are still, collectively, learning how to make these communities best serve their members.