Before I explain this equation, I should explain how I reached to it.

I work for the company which employ scary smart and insanely intelligent people. It is very hard to keep pace with them. However, as a man of average intelligence, I have to device a way to keep up with these smart people.

After close observation and careful studying there thought process, and seen how any topic, issue, problem is shredded by these people, I reached to following conclusion. First these people are really smart and some what god gifted as far as the grey matter in their head is concern. To analyze any idea in hand, they quickly see it  from different angles; they check all the attributes, they evaluate its Extensibility, can this idea be extended for future growth, complexity in implementation, How complex the solution is, can any one else understand it other then the original author.  Operation headaches, What other problems it will create for oprations. Manageability, can the code for this cool trick will be maintainable. Performance, How it will effect the performance of the overall system. Localization issues, usability and last what the standard says about it. Of course all these attributes are evaluated in less then 10 millisecond. Now people like me who are not so evolved, may take to go thru this process at least a second, and then I am sure I will not even remember all the important attribute against which any idea is to be evaluated.

So, do you see now, I made a list of attributes against which every idea should be checked, and the first letters of attributes are as follows E,C,O,M,P,L,U,S.   E is for extensibility, C for complexity, O for Operations, M-Manageability, P-Performance, L-Localization, U-Usability and S-Standards etc … As you can see that these letters form my above equation.

Now when ever I come across some new idea, a topic, a fragment of code I evaluate it against my E= COM+ equation. Simple, now I can also pretend to be half smart as these people in my company. This equation is still missing many things, many important attributes not covered by this equation. One most important one is the historic perspective of any issue, How in past decisions were made and what are the ramifications of those decision. How industry other players, other technologies solved these problem etc. However it covers a pretty broad base and gives a small tool to aid my thinking process so I can keep my head above water.