I have spent the best part of the last 1 year on a large project with many cross functional teams building a .NET application that integrates with a specialised vendor ERP system. As with any experience, you learn a great deal about yourself and others.
My greatest lesson is that there is a lot of crap software out there making lots of money and that good software (read this as open source) rarely, if ever, makes money.
With the crap software come the zealots and snake oil salesmen selling their bogus cures and panaceas .
If ever I had to express this in mathematical terms, I would say that:
The rate of return on investment on a software asset is inversely proportional to the quality of the code deployed.
This appears to tie with the empirical data, but as with any such observations, outliers or exceptions will exist.
I suppose our challenge as software craftsmen is to ensure that quality and ROI is balanced.
