Day: 19 September 2006

I'm working on a project to relpace the funtionality of an existing system that is shared by two business units, so that each unit can continue development in differing directions. The customer asked me about how to make the decision of whether to build a change or new feature into the existing system and then later into the new system, or to build it only in the new system and force the business to wait until the next release. It reminded me of the Decision Tree problem I faced before, so I set to work on answering the question. But I ran into a stumbling block. The two solutions are as follows: a) build now in existing system, and then again in the new system b) force the business to wait, and build it later in the new system While the former option might not cost double because of the learning curve of the first implementation, the latter option might take a very long time if the prerequisite features for the change have not already been implemented in the new system. So both options have their own complexities. But in theory we can put costs down, and calculate the answer to the question: a) = 50k + 52.5k = 102.5k (assuming 5% inflation over the year) b) = X + 52.5k = ? Hmmm... how do you put a price on the cost of forcing the business to wait? Well, I struggled with that, because its probably very specific to…

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