[Web4lib] RE: vendors and usability

[C.S. Durfee]

As far as I know, vendors haven't ever made that claim.  I made that
claim.  If you disagree with it, I'd like to hear your reasoning or
evidence to the contrary rather than some blanket statement like "that
sounds like it came directly from a TLC proposal...it's simply not
true".

I made it because I know about how many lines of code there are in the
entire OpenOffice suite (about 10 million lines total among the 5
separate programs that make up the suite) and about how many lines of
code there were in one major ILS vendor's product as of a couple of
years ago (around 3 million if you include the OPAC software). 
OpenOffice Writer has pretty much the same feature set as MS Word.  So
with only a little handwaving I feel confident saying that there are
about as many lines of code in a for-pay ILS as MS Word, and since the
ILS holds your hand a lot less than Word does, I think that adds up to
it being much more complex overall.

Furthermore, the documentation on all the configurable features in
that major ILS is about 2500 pages long, it's written at a very high
level for people with a deep knowledge of how libraries operate and is
not particularly prolix.  "Microsoft Word 2003 Inside Out" is 976
pages long, a lot of which is on using Visual Basic for Applications
macros, and is written for total beginners.  The ILS' manuals don't
cover programming stored procedures or scripting at all, which would
be the  equivalent to VBA macros.  I think the number of pages of
documentation required to operate a piece of software is probably an
even better measure of how complex it is than the number of lines. 
The number of function points would be the best metric, but I don't
know if anyone's performed such an analysis on any ILS software.


On 7/18/05, Joshua Ferraro <jmf at liblime.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 18, 2005 at 02:03:52PM -0700, C.S. Durfee wrote:
> > Library systems software is extremely complex.  There are a lot of
> > reasons for that (some obvious, some not so obvious) which I won't go
> > into here, but it is.  I do not know for sure, but I am willing to bet
> > that the number of function points (a standard metric of software
> > complexity) for a complete ILS is much higher than for, say, MS Word.
> > I would love to see a vendor actually provide such an analysis to
> > their customers, though.
> Ha! that sounds like it came directly from a TLC proposal ;-). The fact
> is, library software isn't that complex compared to a word processing
> suite like MS Office or OpenOffice.org. I don't know when vendors
> started making this claim but it's simply not true.
> 
> What is true is that the marketplace for ILSes is finite (which isn't
> the case for MS Office yet). So libraries can make vendors jump through
> enormous loops to prove that their product is better than the competition.
> On-site demonstrations, lengthy RFPs and responses, etc.
> 
> This process drives up the price enormously ... license fees are the
> other major unnecessary cost involved in ILSes.
> 
> > I do agree with the suggestion to do what you can to get the best
> > software for your money.  Capitalism is a great way of encouraging the
> > development of better products.  If one vendor is better than the
> > others, by all means, give them your business!  And even if you are
> > using the best vendor in the world, negotiate for the best price you
> > can get.
> I agree with you 100%.
> 
> Cheers,
> --
> Joshua Ferraro               VENDOR SERVICES FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE
> President, Technology       migration, training, maintenance, support
> LibLime                                Featuring Koha Open-Source ILS
> jmf at liblime.com |Full Demos at http://liblime.com/koha |1(888)KohaILS
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