This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: More Consistency, or just more? Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants

One of the tensions that comes between Product Management and engineering is component importation. The people who build infrastructure would (generally) prefer to do the work in-house. No, it's not all an NIH problem - there's a rational reason for it. You need look no further than the current version of VisualWorks to see what I'm talking about. We've imported a bunch of tools over the last few releases:

• The Refactoring Browser
• The Professional Debug Package
• The ICC ADvance Tools

Now, look at the various inconsistencies in the menus, keyboard shortcuts (etc.) between these tools and things we've built internally (like the new inspectors and the workspace). That's the downside of bringing in third party tools - there's a fair bit of adaptation to make them "fit" with everything else (not to mention underlying framework issues that might crop up). On the other hand, doing all the work internally isn't an answer either - you get marvelously consistent tools, but they appear a lot more slowly. As to resource constraints - it's never easy to "just hire enough people" to build tools. There are constraints in any business, and Cincom Smalltalk is no different from any other here - we have to live within our means, just like everyone else.

So where does that leave us? I'm making this post in part to ask the community. Importing tools from the community into the product (even free ones) adds functionality quickly, but at the cost of adding inconsistency to the tools (and adding back-end cleanup work to our team's queue). Not importing tools has a cost as well - the question is, which way do you, the end users of our products prefer?