Thursday 25 January 2007

What is the primary asset of a software development company?

What is the primary asset of a software company?

I would suggest to you that the primary asset of a software company is not its client base. Shocking?
Not its staff. Still shocking? Not its buildings. Not its business processes. Not its business process infrastructure.

All of these things are important, yes. VERY important? Yes. Really really important? Yes. And certainly you can’t be running too much of a business without them. But not primarily important.

I would suggest that the primary asset of a software company is none of these.

The primary asset of a software company is it’s CODEBASE.

However, the code base is only an asset of the business to the extent that it is maintainable, extensible, revisable and re-applicable to a changing set of business scenarios within a changing local and global business environment.

So the really interesting question becomes, not how to write code that is reusable. But rather how to build a code base, and code library, which is maintainable, extensible, revisable and most importantly of all re-applicable.

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