Category: contract

Economical trust

June 2, 2008 by Artem

Upfront planning

Last weeks I spent huge amount of time negotiating with the renovation company about the details of our upcoming bathroom renovation. You know, all this bargaining, market research and choosing between a multitude of option takes time. To make things even more complicated our house manager happened to be very peculiar about what he can allow to be changed - it triggered yet another round of negotiations and renegotiations even though we signed the contract already.

The biggest problem is that there is a decent element of uncertainty. Some technical decision can be made only after they start works and break the walls. Therefore we have to nail down plan B and plan C well in advance not to be offered a bill with the "additional costs" after the fact.

Why no fixed contracts in Agile

April 1, 2008 by Artem

While it is possible to utilize fixed price, fixed scope contracts with the agile methods, fixed contracts are still discouraged in preference of time & materials or Pay per Use. The reasons is that in most if not all cases software development is not a mass production, but a new product development. It is rarely possible to just clone the existing system for a new client. At best, when implementing tunings for a new client, we can try copying the existing approach or best practices. Therefore in order to build something that is not known to the last bit in advance we have to unfix at least one angle of the quality triangle