HW23: Chapter 22

22.6 Fixed-price contracts, where the contractor bids a fixed price to complete a system development, may be used to move project risk from client to contractor. If anything goes wrong, the contractor has to pay. Suggest how such contracts may increase the likelihood that product risks will arise.

Product risks affect the quality or performance of the software being developed.  During testing issues might be uncovered that weren’t part of the agreed upon requirements.  But if a contractor has burned through their allotted budget on development and held nothing in case bugs are found then the software being delivered will have bugs which is obviously bad quality software.  It is important that if a contractor is to agree to a fixed-price that they save enough of the budget towards bug fixes resulting from testing and the inevitable extras that no one has thought of that come up like maybe release notes or documentation expenditures.  Performance is also tied to a lot of non functional requirements like usability, maintainability, reliability, and availability — most of the -ilities.  The contractor could be meeting all the functional requirements and still deliver a poor quality product whose performance is abysmal because there’s no budget left to refactor or identify and eliminate bottle-necks in the software.