Reply to post: Re: As per usual

UK Home Office's £885m crim records digi effort: A 'masterclass in incompetence'

Jon 37

Re: As per usual

The purchasing process was designed to purchase the cheapest possible items when you're buying huge amounts of well-specified commodity physical items. They stick out an RFP with the specs, and buy the cheapest.

It utterly fails at dealing with things that aren't commodities.

A "commodity" is something where there's a market for the things and they're pretty much the same and interchangeable, like sugar or crude oil.

Bespoke software development is about as far from a commodity as you can possibly get. For a start, the idea that there will be good specs at the beginning of such a project is a fantasy - it's impossible to do that as some developer will always find a way to screw up that the specifier hadn't anticipated. The only truly complete spec is a working system.

And since the purchase process is built around the fantasy of specs, it doesn't incorporate trials.

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