I am listening to the latest Java Posse podcast, a session from this years round-up titled, Don’t Repeat Yourself. In the discussion, Tor Norbye made the statement that, “programming is all trade-offs.”  This is a great point.  For what ever my strengths and weaknesses are as a developer, I have long believed that one of the main values I bring to each of my projects is a natural cost benefit analysis mechanism.  It seems that most anything is truly possible in software these days.  So, understanding the costs of each decision is one of the most important parts of building quality software.