Software projects fail, and they fail big. But small pieces of software are easier. You might think it’s less risky to trust a supplier to produce something small compared to something big.
I think this is generally true. However, software size is not the only issue—there’s also the question of its impact on your business. Sometimes a tiny piece of software may be critical.
My brother-in-law has an e-shop on BigCommerce plus some invoicing software. The invoicing software connects to BigCommerce, fetches the orders, and prints the invoices.
The connector must be two hundred lines of code or so. The company that wrote it did so twice. The first version was so buggy and hard to fix that after a couple of years they rewrote it from scratch. The second version barely worked. Month after month after month, something wasn’t working right, and my brother-in-law spent lots of time talking to technical support in frustration. They fixed it and it broke again. And it was just a silly program, quite easy to write. I know because I wrote such a BigCommerce connector for a different purpose, and it’s been working flawlessly for five years, with barely any support.