5 questions to ask ourselves before using a third-party library in an app

“Don’t reinvent the weel” is a quote we’ve heard a lot as developers during our career. We’ve been constantly encouraged to design our apps making sure we’re not re-writing someone else’s implementation because, at the end, we would supposedly reduce our estimates and make it faster. It’s totally understandable that we should be efficient enough to build software based on solid and mature reusable implementations, as we keep our own code reusable enough. However, incorporating third-party dependencies as our “de-facto” option when looking to reduce costs and save some development hours, could often turn back to us after hitting production, and hidden costs will be just part of that.

Before cloning that cool repo with most of the code we need for our project, we should ask ourselves a few questions:

1. Does it offer something we’re completely unable to code?

And I would add “… in a reasonable time and with equal quality?”. It’s fine to get into a position in which we face a challenging functionality that is widely available on the market. We would be quickly tempted to look for a very solid open-source implementation and spend our time just adapting it to our needs. But open-source is not exactly free. It’s very common that an…