Siim Viikman's blog

People like to think that having an in-house framework for all the projects with all available different kind of 3rd-party libraries is a good thing. Hey, you can save a bunch of time when you doesn’t have to write common code over and over again, don’t you?

Well, things aren’t so simple. Having some extras always causes some burden on the maintenance. There are plenty of reasons to prove that:

• Framework should be developed separately from projects using it
  It adds extra overhead to update the framework, because someone must check if the proposed change fits in the framework. And after the change, projects which use the framework should also be updated. It all takes extra time which could be avoided.
• Who is the charge of the development?
  Someone must be the charge of the framework or it ends like a /dev/null – holding bunch of stuff that nobody uses. The one should be responsible of selecting features to add or not to add.
• Tracking framework versions
• Projects have different requirement to fit all
  Most of the projects are still quite different by their requirements, so framework may finally contain much code which is used by the one-two separate projects only
• It takes time to develop correct and working framework
  All takes time, so instead of creating business value, we spend time to create some internal framework which, in the end, is used only by the single project. What a waste of the resources.

I have participated in a quite a few projects where common frameworks were a hot topic and we tried to make all things so general that it would fit in the framework. But in the end we spent more time on developing the framework than creating the business value, so the projects delayed. There were times when I personally also believed that a framework is a must and tried to create a usable framework before creating some real value (also in my personal projects).

I’m not saying that all the frameworks are bad, I just think that developing your own framework may not be such a good idea. In my opinion, such frameworks should be open source, so the community can be charge of the road.