Cost, Quality & Performance
It is generally regarded that there are three primary properties of a software product: cost of development, performance (speed/memory etc) and software quality. It is believed that you can only ever obtain two of these properties at the cost of the remaining property e.g, you can have high performance and high quality but it won’t be cheap to develop.
My experiences over the years tends to confirm this rule of thumb but I can’t help wondering if that fictional high performance, high quality and low development cost software has ever been made?
Performance, cost and quality are achieved with the ingeniously simple applications. Those are the applications that “just work”. It’s those that are rare. Constant changes and improvements during development add more complexity which the end user may or may not use and wind up compromising the cost-performance-quality triangle. Increasingly complex software is the norm, making all our lives more interesting