Exploring the Basal Cost of software
Thoughtworks Technology Podcast
Thoughtworks
4.7 • 53 Ratings
🗓️ 20 October 2022
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The “Basal Cost” of software is an idea from Eduardo Ferro Aldama. The term is borrowed from biology, where the "Basal Metabolic Rate" refers to the number of calories a human body burns just to maintain normal functioning. Applied to software development, the concept is intended to help us pay much more attention to the long term costs — like additional complexity and maintenance — of building a new feature.
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, James Lewis and Georgina Giannoukou join hosts Neal Ford and Birgitta Böckeler to discuss the Basal Cost of software and explore how it can help organizations and software development teams better manage product and system complexity.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the ThoughtWorks Technology podcast. |
| 0:07.0 | I'm one of your regular host, Newell Ford, and I'm joined today by another of our regular host, Brigitte. |
| 0:13.0 | Hi, I'm Begita Buechala. I'm a technical principal out of the Berlin office of ThoughtWorks. |
| 0:19.0 | And we are currently in Barcelona for the Doppler meeting where we put |
| 0:23.4 | together the radar. And one of the topics that's actually several years old that we never got a |
| 0:28.8 | chance to talk about, we're going to talk about today, with a couple of our colleagues. I'll let them |
| 0:33.5 | introduce themselves. Hi, I'm James Lewis. I'm a technical director for the workspace |
| 0:37.9 | and I'm a London office. And hello, I'm Georgina Jannuku. I'm a lead developer from the Madrid |
| 0:42.6 | office. And today we're going to talk about the basal cost of software development. So would |
| 0:48.8 | someone please describe what that is? It's a metaphor. Yeah, I can go ahead. |
| 1:00.5 | So basal cost of software is a term coined by Eduardo Ferro back in 2020 in his blog post, |
| 1:04.8 | basal cost of software, which basically outlines that the cost of features, not just the cost of initial development, but the cost of maintenance, the cost of onboarding, |
| 1:09.6 | and it increases and maintains |
| 1:11.9 | after until the feature is dead. |
| 1:16.4 | And what is that term? |
| 1:17.5 | I was stumbling across this word basal first. |
| 1:20.2 | Can you go a little bit into his metaphor? |
| 1:21.9 | Yeah. |
| 1:22.9 | So it's a metaphor from the basal metabolic rate that a human requires just the amount of calories burned just |
| 1:28.8 | by existing, not doing anything. So if we put it in software features, it's the same, basically. |
| 1:35.3 | So basically, it reminds us that besides building something new and always building new things, |
| 1:42.4 | we need to understand that a software will cost us |
... |
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