Development teams are challenged to build increasingly competitive products, but they must overcome difficult tradeoffs to do so. They must prioritize a mounting backlog of new feature requests, balance innovation with maintenance, manage growing technical debt, improve quality and usability, accelerate delivery, and reduce cost — all at the same time.
Given limited resources, developers must optimize their investments to reflect true customer needs — while also anticipating customers’ emerging requirements. Suboptimal product roadmap decisions can be disastrous.
To get this information, they are increasingly turning to software usage analytics solutions that:
As developers contemplate usage analytics, one early question they often face is: should we build or buy? This guide sheds light on this decision from the standpoint of the development and product management teams. It assesses issues ranging from time-to-market to the direct and indirect costs of development and ongoing operation. Finally, it considers an alternative to home-built systems.