Choosing Technology

Pros and cons of using “bleeding-edge” technology

Technology is a hot topic. Sometimes, advertising that we’re using cutting-edge technology for our project serves as a strong marketing tool. Furthermore, the motivation of the project members is often higher if they know they can learn a lot of new things, which in turn will have a positive influence on their resumes. So, we’ll always find several people on our team who would like to make use of the latest technology.

So, on one hand, the use of new technology will have a positive impact on the morale and motivation of our team, and on our ability to market our system. On the other hand, running a large project with a large team is already risky in many ways; using new technology will only make it even riskier. As Pete McBreen said on this topic in his book Software Craftsmanship:

“Bleeding-edge technologies are great sources of subtle mistakes and errors. To avoid major problems later, the development team must spend time early in the project trying to find all of the surprises, traps, and pitfalls.”

​​Risks of using bleeding-edge technology

To be more precise, here are the important risks of using popular technology:

• The more popular the technology, the riskier it is. Chances are low that any other project has successfully worked with the technology in question. This means our project will serve as somewhat of a guinea pig, discovering the problems and/or limitations of the technology, which loses time and money in the process.
• There are no experienced people available, either in our company or in the market. The most experienced people we can get are the ones who have read (or written) an article on the topic and have implemented “Hello World!” with the new technology. Despite their relative inexperience, these people will be very expensive because no matter how limited their experience is with the technology, it is more than most people have.
• The technology’s producer is looking for a guinea pig. They want to improve the technology as well as the skills of their consultants. Beware—the producer’s consultants have never built a real application using this new technology.
• Although our customer believes it would be cool to be the first one using this hot technology, they would not like to risk the delivery of the application (in time) or the quality of it.