The “Basal Cost” of software is an idea from Eduardo Ferro. The term borrows from biology, where the basal metabolic rate refers to the number of calories a human body burns just to maintain normal functioning. Applied to software development, the concept is intended to help us pay much more attention to the long term costs — like additional complexity and maintenance — of building a new feature. In this episode of the Technology Podcast, James Lewis and Georgina Giannoukou join hosts Neal Ford and Vegeta Bakala to discuss the idea of the basal cost of software and how it can help organizations and software development teams better manage product and system complexity.