In the computer services industry (Software), there tend to be 2 type of software developments. Customized System Integration(SI) projects and Software Products. SI Projects are one off customized solution developed to suit a particular business need. They tend to range in the thousands of dollars as the system is only sold once. Most consumers will only come into contact with such software at their work place. Software Products on the other hand refer to things like your Microsoft Windows. After developing the product, many copies of it are made to be sold to the rest of the world.
Generally, Customized Systems not only costs more, but also tend to be of lower quality. Quality issues creep in as they are not tested with a large enough user base. It is not surprising to discover new bugs in the software even after it has been commissioned and running for over a year…. And that’s where lucrative maintenance contracts creep in….
Software Products on the other hand tend to be widely tested by their user base. Recently, I had to pick up the loose ends of a project and could not be more disgusted by the development efforts of one of my developers…. It was a Joomla application, done with no regards to the Joomla framework. Darn… looks like there will be heck of a lot of work for me to touch up….
For those of you who are familiar with Joomla, read on… for other more ordinary folks… please ignore this…
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