Measuring the Time Saved When Reusing a Well Architected Component

A well architected component is easy to develop given the right technical knowledge, practice, skill, and motivation to do the right thing.  I’m taking a practical example of a component I developed recently, described in the blog post titled Getting to the Monetary Value of Software Architecture.  Relatively speaking this component wasn’t complex to develop, but it did require some trial and error and some clever thinking to perfect it.  Development of this component took just over 4 hours to complete – and contains 80+ lines of code (that’s code, not including comments or blank lines), and once it was complete we could apply and reuse this functionality in various places with extreme simplicity.  Actually, with only one line of code!!  That’s the power of simplicity and reusability.  See the actual code for the component here: Class to Add Instant ‘As You Type’ Filter Functionality to Infragistics UltraCombo Control

In a recent blog post, I talked about the monetization of well architected solutions.  Here I am going to put some hard values against it.  I used the following variables to come up with the data to put into the chart.

Initial development time required: 240 mins

Time required to duplicate this functionality once (non architected solution): 15 mins (assuming the user is somewhat familiar with the code and is copying and pasting) – I would comfortably say it could take 30 mins for someone who isn’t quite sure how the code worked to begin with and therefore not knowing exactly which code is required to be copied – this would double the blue time line as shown on the char below.

Time required to duplicate this functionality once (well architected solution): 1 min  (it’s literally one line of code!)

These numbers were taken from the time it took to actually do the implementation several time.  The 15 mins value required to duplicate the functionality for the non architected solution was derived from practicing a copy and paste scenario to integrate code to add the functionality required. 

This does not account for the extra effort required in the future to maintain the code or make updates and enhancements.  With the well architected component you have to make an update somewhere in 80 lines of code to fix a bug or add an enhancement.  In the non architected version, you would be making a change within (80 x N) lines of code where N is the number of implementations.  Let’s say 10 – so we’ve got 800 lines of this code that essentially do the same thing over again that need to be looked at to make a code change!  Plus all of the other application code intertwined within it that you have to ignore.

This is just one example!  There are great architectures all over the place and we all (mostly) know how valuable they are.  Other than just saying “Yeah, they save tons of time..”, I’m here putting some hard values against it. 

This is one scenario, but there are many more scenarios that save even more time – I’d even say, exponentially save more time!