Delivering software projects: Drupal, Joomla or just go bespoke?

Imagine you are building a house and the time has come to install the electrics. Which of the following do you do:

1. Buy an 'off-the-shelf', 'one-size-fits-all' complete home eletrical system and then hire an electrician to customize and tailor the system to fit your needs, or
2. Hire an electrician straight-off to build the electrical system for you?

The first option may seem like a good way to save time and possibly money by buying a pre-built solution and hiring an expert engineer to tailor the system. However, such pre-built electrical systems are not available in shops because customizing a system that does not do what it is supposed to can often be more expensive that simply building the exact system to requirements.

Importantly, the second option works. An expert is hired to use their skills, experience and tools knowledge to deliver exactly what a client needs - nothing more and nothing less. This is the general approach taken not just in small-scale or private engineering, but also in large scale commercial engineering projects. And this is also the reason why 'off-the-shelf', 'one-size-fits-all' systems are simply not available for purchase - nobody builds them because nobody would buy them.


So why is the world of software engineering projects so obsessed with using off-the-shelf one-size-fits-all software like Drupal and Joomla which almost certainly do not do what the client wants out of the box and will almost certainly need extensive customization and tailoring? Why not follow the rest of the engineering world and deliver client software by using expert engineers to build tailored applications that do exactly what is required using the most appropriate tools and techniques available?

I believe there are three reasons to explain the software engineering obsession with using 'off-the-shelf' systems:

1. Building systems like Drupal and Joomla is actually pretty easy, which explains why there are hundreds, if not thousands of these types of 'one-size-fits-all' systems on the market. And the sheer number of these systesm gives an overall impression that we should be using them.
2. Self preservation - if a software project fails, it is difficult to blame the guy that chose to use Drupal, whereas it is probably much easier to blame the guy that chose to build a bespoke system.
3. In a few cases, for simple systems like very basic websites an 'off-the-shelf' system can help speed things along if very minimal customization is required - which of course is simply not the majority of high-value business systems.

A fourth reason is the often stated benefit that building a system based on an off-the-shelf product will avoid technology lock-in and avoid the problems of supporting proprietory software. However, I believe this goal is rarely, if ever achieved. It is highly likely that the parts of an off-the-shelf system that have been customized and tailored for a particular client are also likely to be the parts of the system that add most value to the client (by the very nature of those parts having been written to satisfy a specific client need).  So in many cases, the most valuable parts of system are also likely to be 100% proprietory with no support available from either the off-the-shelf product team or the open source community.

It is unlikely that designing and building an RDBMS from scratch would be a necessity for a given software project, therefore it is likely to be a good idea to use an off-the-shelf solution for this type of specific system component. The same goes for other system components like computer languages, operating systems, communication protocols etc. However, depending on client needs, the design and implementation of a new type of RDBMS maybe exactly what is required. This is to say that even with a bespoke project a vast amount of functionality can be provided by pre-built technologies. However, if a key requirement can not be serviced by pre-built technology then it will have to be built from scratch - drupal or no drupal.

There are many great and often free tools that software engineers can use to build high-quality applications quickly and effectively. An experienced and expert software engineer should be able to choose which of these tools and technologies best fits a clients needs and deliver a bespoke system faster than using a 'one-size-fits-all' product.

I wonder if as the software engineering industry matures that we will see fewer 'off-the-shelf' 'one-size-fits-all' packages and move toward boutique software consultancies that delier high-quality solutions quickly and cost effectively. And more importantly that the software engineering industry follows in the foot steps of far more mature engineering industries.