| i would think Martin Fowler would know better than this. to argue that the meaningful rubric of effort ought to be a "product", he creates a straw-man called a "project" the much more meaningful comparison is to compare products versus "platforms" and "tools/infrastructure" if he had done that, then he i bet that he would conclude that all three rubrics of effort are necessary, and preferring one vs the other is a question of priority, not "do one instead of the other" ie: some things you built to sell; other things you build so you can build those things better and more efficiently; and still others you build for use as reusable or modular components across multiple future products, so you don't have to build the same component over again for each product that requires it "tools", eg: the 250-developer-hours spent on a "project" to create an automated testing & deployment pipeline, will likely net out in a few months and result in higher quality products almost immediately "platform": a "project" to factor out code common across many workflows in a typical web app, and re-implement that code as microservices having endpoints available to any of the multiple data flows that need them (for instance, "user-login & authentication", "user-profile fetch", "re-ordering user-search results using learning-to-rank algorithm" etc a project to build such reusable utility micro-services obviously don't result in a "product", and yet such a project is usually cost-justified (in CFO terms) even over short-term periods (< 90 days) |
Who is going to pay them and how to validate how much money would have been saved, if those 25k euros hadn't been spent?
Edit: should learn math. :)