Total Cost of Owning a Feature
Business Awareness: How much are we going to invest in building an idea and how can we calculate that cost?
A colleague once told me, “We build it — we own it.” This meant that once our team develops a feature and releases it, we will have to maintain, fix and improve it as long as it is used in production. If we could summarize all the days spent on a feature during its entire lifecycle (from defining requirements, through development and fixing issues, until decommissioning), we would know the total cost of owning it. Will it pay off? How difficult is it to guess the total cost? And why does it matter?
Let’s take a look at transportation as an example. Here is a list of a few activities that take a lot of time and effort without a car: going to work, taking children to school, picking up groceries from the supermarket, visiting friends on the other side of the city, transporting a piece of small furniture to your home, going to the countryside, and an urgent visit to the hospital.
Owning a car saves us a lot of time in these activities. But there are costs of owning a car. First, you need to buy one (and its value keeps dropping from the moment you drive it off the lot). Also, fuel costs money. Insurance too. Your time and money for maintenance are costs, as are your…
