Hi, John. John Domingue wrote:
John and Paola, thanks for your comments. I understand that there are many variables. I would like to convey to a non-computer scientist audience the significant effort that goes into software production in order to motivate software and component re-use.
It's very difficult to construct a case to persuade hypothetical, uninformed people of anything, because, by definition, you don't know what they don't know. > Otherwise a naive person may ask "why not just create the software > you need on demand every time?". Two things: + in all seriousness, who cares what naïve people think about anything? + to answer the question asked: "because it's obviously a waste of effort to repeat any non-trivial activity if you don't have to." Who, specifically, are you trying to inform, and what's at stake if they remain ignorant? If you want some fun, get together an open-source developer, an in-house Agile project manager, a sales person from a big consulting firm, and flight-systems engineer from an aerospace company, and get them to agree on what the cost of developing software is. Bring popcorn.
If its not possible to give anything near an order-of-magnitude-industry-average-answer or range I understand.
my ($time,$cost) = Hypothetical::PieceOfString::Factory->new(); Now, that's code re-use! :-) -- Frank Wales [fr...@limov.com] -- The Open University is incorporated by Royal Charter (RC 000391), an exempt charity in England & Wales and a charity registered in Scotland (SC 038302).
