"Off the shelf" OTS or "Do it yourself" DIY when it comes to software engineering in teams the DIY approach is usually the one followed. Some poor guy/gal develops some tool that grows and grows over the duration of the campaign and becomes a dependable tool for the team to do whatever... (sail vision, management, performance, construction.....).
Great one would think, this is EXACTLY what we need. Well maybe but not really. The reality shows different:
- The people designing this mostly don't have great knowledge about software engineering / database modeling, or system resource management -> The program doesnt scale, database models can't grow,
- Nothing will be documented so when the person leaves the project, the software becomes usless.
With the money and time invested these people trying at their best to solve a problem, one has to understand that this is not cheaper. At the end the product is more expensive, less reliable and there is no investment protection because of the probability that if the designer leaves the program becomes unusable/changeable.
OTS "Off the shelf" will most likly do whatever one is looking for. Lets be honest what does a team need to do with data, it does data mining and charts/graphics from that, this all needs to be fast and easy to use. Correlate it with whatever boat setup/weather... it's not really rocket science.
Conclusion is that maybe an OTS solution is more expensive, but at least there is company behind it that will hopefully be there in 3-4 years, and they do the development, not someone in the team, there is a support hotline and all the other features that come along when one buys software.
So for whatever project a DYI is on the table one should look at the size of the tool and then maybe weigh in the OTS solution aswell.
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