UDC 004.4

No Cure No Pay: How to Contract for Software Services

Tom Gilb1

  1. Independent Consultant
    Tom@Gilb.com

Abstract

Contractual motivation is needed to avoid costly project failures and improve the delivery of stakeholder value. Only if the supplier management is made to feel the pain of project failure will it strive to avoid it. The current culture of rewarding failure, by paying for systems development work regardless of the product delivered, must be altered. Such contractual motivation must be supported by quantitative requirements and evolutionary delivery. Quantitative requirements allow project progress and success to be measured enabling monitoring and testing for contractual compliance. Evolutionary delivery (that is, delivering early high value in small increments and using feedback from deliverables to determine future increments) allows early reporting of the ability of systems development to deliver and so enables any required corrective actions. Note: This paper specifically addresses the software problem, but the ideas most likely apply to the wider systems engineering problem to some interesting degree as well.

Publication information

Volume 4, Issue 1 (Jun 2007)
Year of Publication: 2007
ISSN: 2406-1018 (Online)
Publisher: ComSIS Consortium

Full text

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How to cite

Gilb, T.: No Cure No Pay: How to Contract for Software Services. Computer Science and Information Systems, Vol. 4, No. 1, 29-42. (2007)