I’ve come across some government agencies and other businesses claiming they’d spent millions of dollars developing an app. How can developing an app could cost so much money?
In: 496
Even many people in the industry have no idea how expensive software development is. One time I had to bid on the doing the embedded system software for a big mechanical device, I didn’t get the job. Later they told me that my software bid was nearly what they had charged their customer for development of the whole project. After they finished it the lead engineer said well, yes, I was right, they totally underestimated the software development, integration and testing required. They of course lost money on the job. Sometimes it is better to lose a job that get it. I think a lot of the problem may be that you cannot see software as you can when building for example a house. A software engineer friend told me his metric was to take his worst case estimate and multiply by pi. That might be optimistic. (source: had my own software consulting business for 35 years)
Latest Answers