build-vs-buy

Reasons not to build your own bug tracking system

Several times now I've been faced with plans from a team that wants to build their own bug tracking system - Not as a product, but as an internal tool. The arguments I've heard in favous are usually along the lines of : Wanting to 'eat our own dog food' in terms of some internally built web framework Needing some highly specialised re...

What functionality should always be third-party?

What prompts my question is this post from Jeff Atwood, and this post from Dare Obasanjo. It seems to me that there might be at least a few areas where third-party functionality is a better idea than custom code. For example, should logging always be third-party? How about encryption? Or search? I'm looking forward to everyone's fee...

Should I prefer purchasing a commercial framework or creating my own version of the same functionality? (classic "Create vs Buy")

I have mixed views about commercial class libraries. Am I better off using a commercial class library or starting from scratch? If buying a library is the way forward which one for a C# developer? ...

Build vs. Buy & Integrate - How do YOU make the decision?

I've seen a lot of questions and discussions about build vs. buy, but most stick with the simplistic approach that you can simply do one or the other. Most of the time you have to either buy and integrate or build yourself. Either way you're in for some work. In the next 30-60 days I NEED to implement a couple managerial projects to kee...

CRM for a call-center, with strong integration - build or buy?

We have a custom CRM solution that among several things handles our call-center. That is, each call-center operator gets a queue of people (potential customers) to call based on a number of configurable rules. For example, certain operators only handle certain types of users. Call queues are ordered by call-time taking timezones into acc...

Embed Google/ Yahoo search into a web site or build your own

I am looking for an opinion on the whether to use Google custom search, Yahoo search builder or build my own for web projects (no more than 100 pages of content). If I should build my own - do you have any fast start kits you could recommend? Many thanks Chris ...

How to decide: build from scratch or reverse engineer off the shelf solution

Let's say someone asked me to build them a youtube clone with a lot of customizations to support a whole bunch of wacky things they want to do. How do I decide if it's better for me to build from scratch vs. build off a white label or open source product? Because of my past work experience, I am biased to build from scratch because the...

CMS: Build vs. Buy

Possible Duplicate: CMS: Build or Buy? I'm in the same boat as a lot of other folks. Trying to decide between two competing vendor's solutions for my company (build vs. buy, basically). I won't be coding it myself, we'll be hiring one of the two firms. It'll be a total bottom-to-top rebuild of a magazine-style site with regu...