Software: How do you know when it is Green, Ripe, or Rotten?

Farmers Market Fruit Stand, public domain image @ http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/view-image.php?image=149772&picture=farmers-market-fruit-stand

How to buy fruits?

When I was a child, I spent a lot of time with my grandmother. She was raised in a remote agriculture community of my country. So she was very experienced with agriculture products. I love fruit juices and she love to consent all her grandchildren. One of the earlier lessons that I learned was how to pick a good, ready to eat, fruit. There were “easy” ones, like mangoes. Even a child can tell when a mango is not ready to eat yet, ripe, or overripe. But I also face more difficult challenges like melons and passion fruits. 

Those two have a similar little trick, as my grandmother teach me. You have to evaluate the outer layer, or skin, and look for overripe signs. If the outer layer was looks ripe, but firm, then you have to evaluate the inside of the fruit, without open it. Here comes the trick: you must shake the fruit near one of your ears and try to “listen” for the seeds to bounce and hit the inner cavity. If you feel or hear the seeds bouncing then there are good chances that the fruit was ready to eat.

You must have similar stories with culture and region specifics variations. There are other kind of “passed-on” skills like how to buy the best used car with a limited budget.

Now you could be a ground-up woman or man. You may be a c-level executive, a manager or any organizational role facing the decision of buy software products and / or services. And here comes the question: Do you know how to buy a software that is just “ready to eat”?

How to buy software?

Unfortunately, our elders did not taught us how to buy a good piece of software: a “healthy” one. Now we are facing that problem, and each day it becomes bigger and bigger. The average executive does not know how to evaluate the quality attributes of a software product. The more versed ones only know how to ask for aesthetics (visual), usability (easy to use, responsiveness, etc.), and functional quality. So they know how to assess if a software is “easy to use”, “looks pretty” (as of the industry and user-base standards), and if presents the functional characteristics they need (modules, features, etc.).

But there are other quality characteristics of a software products less obvious to the end user. To keep this discussion out of the technical (software engineering) jargon, just imagine (as with the fruits), that software products have an “inside” meat, that needs to be assessed as well. This quality characteristics of the “inside” parts of the software are called Structural Quality Characteristics. 

So, if you are not versed on how to evaluate the “insides” (structural quality) of a software product, do not worry. There are quantitative evaluations and even standards that can throw light into this matter. The last question will be: How to connect all this with my reality?

What to do?

Let's say that you are a COO (Chief Operations Officers), or a CFO (Chief Financial Officers); and you are involved in a big project requiring the purchase of a very expensive software product. If you are not in a very specialized industry, there will be lots, or at least two, options. So you need to select the “mature” (not the green, or rotten) one. And remember that “mature” means “good in the outside and in the inside”. Here you need to ask for the experts.

Your due diligence should be to demand that your IT staff, external organization, or an individual consultant bring together an assessment process that translate all this stuff into a simple, quantitative, decision matrix.