Top 10 Questions to Ask to Evaluate Software Assets

Are you evaluating a software asset for a potential purchase, investment, decision making for the future, possible termination, etc?

Here are some questions you should consider:

1. Is this a revenue generating asset? How much revenue does it generate?

2. Is this a cost saving asset? How much cost does it save?

3. Does this asset have some other value? What is its value?

4. How many clients use this system? How many users do I have?  How do I value each client/user of the system?

5. What was the cost of supporting (maintaining, fixing, basic feature addition, deploying, patching, etc.) the application for the last year? What does it cost to keep the users happy?  This is more than just keeping it running.

6. What is the state of the core and non-core technologies built into the application? Will the technologies be supported in the future? How long will that support last?

7. What is the future cost of maintenance? Will there be developers who can work on this technology? How much time will it take to fix things?

8. Will we need to rebuild this application in the future? Will the application scale up if the user base grows?

9. What is the cost of downtime should the application be offline? Do I have a contingency plan if the software is offline?

10. How secure is the application? What kind of data does it store? If that data were exposed what would the cost of that be?

A code audit can’t answer all of the above questions, but it can help you get started with understanding what you have, so that you can make the best-educated decision possible on how to move forward.