3 ms·

The argument that software development has diseconomies of scale is well know e.g. it has been incorporated a long time ago into the COCOMO estimation model. It

The argument that software development has diseconomies of scale is well know e.g. it has been incorporated a long time ago into the COCOMO estimation model. It would be interesting to reverse the question - where does software development really have some economies of scale? What situations does scaling the team or the chunk of software under consideration up make sense? - system testing? - roll-out? - bulk purchasing of licenses for development? - architecture in the sense leveraging consistent frameworks, naming etc. across a team? - infrastructure? - development time too long? (according to COCOMO there is an optimal time and beyond effort increases although slowly) - management of "hit by bus" risk

Joeri 10y ago
Building up an understanding of the domain. The bigger the solution, the more you can charge for it, the smaller the relative cost of understanding the problem space.
yk 10y ago
When I think about economy of scale and software development, all examples I come up with have the property that any gains are diminishing quickly. For example, a large system has a better build system, which catches a higher number of bugs, therefore the developers are more productive until the now larger project eats the added productivity due to higher complexity. On the other hand, what in traditional industries would be called production, that is producing the specific website for one request, has a rather absurd economy of scale. With a single server and a static site you can serve a sizable fraction of the world population, with negligible marginal costs of serving an additional user. Actually Metcalfe's law suggests that the marginal cost of serving an additional user is negative and hence we get the behemoths like Google and Facebook instead of competition of a few different corporations.

Joeri 10y ago

Building up an understanding of the domain. The bigger the solution, the more you can charge for it, the smaller the relative cost of understanding the problem space.

yk 10y ago

When I think about economy of scale and software development, all examples I come up with have the property that any gains are diminishing quickly. For example, a large system has a better build system, which catches a higher number of bugs, therefore the developers are more productive until the now larger project eats the added productivity due to higher complexity. On the other hand, what in traditional industries would be called production, that is producing the specific website for one request, has a rather absurd economy of scale. With a single server and a static site you can serve a sizable fraction of the world population, with negligible marginal costs of serving an additional user. Actually Metcalfe's law suggests that the marginal cost of serving an additional user is negative and hence we get the behemoths like Google and Facebook instead of competition of a few different corporations.