Interesting Read From the Guardian

[alluvial]

Current client co have learned their lesson with that, seen a £100,000 estimate for a system to be built in India hit £10 million and when it got back onshore it cost a good few million to fix. The internal team quoted 8 million for build and management laughed and signed up with the bobs.

Client co no longer gives first version work to India.

That's interesting that. I do wonder just how long it can go on before the idiots in charge finally realise that they are spending money hand over fist for their development work. Not just the initial development but onshore fix costs and higher maintenance costs. I have heard of a couple of other financial institutions that are bringing work back onshore and hoefully it will continue.

Who was it that said if you lose control of your IT, you lose control of your business?

[SueEllen]

That's interesting that. I do wonder just how long it can go on before the idiots in charge finally realise that they are spending money hand over fist for their development work. Not just the initial development but onshore fix costs and higher maintenance costs.

I think the trick is to ensure you are the manager who is there at the start and middle of the project, and moved on long before it's delivered.

[doodab]

I think the trick is to ensure you are the manager who is there at the start and middle of the project, and moved on long before it's delivered.

There are way too many of those around

[minestrone]

I strongly believe that the designer of a system should be onboard from inception to EOL so as to maintain core architecture princicples and to see the errors of the initial design for their own learning. If an architect or a developer never has to deal with the problems they create at start then they never see what they produce as problamatic.

Ach, who cares, invoice day.

[SueEllen]

I strongly believe that the designer of a system should be onboard from inception to EOL so as to maintain core architecture princicples and to see the errors of the initial design for their own learning. If an architect or a developer never has to deal with the problems they create at start then they never see what they produce as problamatic.

Nice in theory but costs too much. There are only a certain number of years someone will put up with 0-2% pay rise.

[minestrone]

Nice in theory but costs too much. There are only a certain number of years someone will put up with 0-2% pay rise.

Is that not a contradiction?

[BlasterBates]

The prediction that systems will get too complex and will cause a crisis have been going since the first wave of computer development in the 1960's. It's like peak oil and climate change, at whatever point you look at it people say the same things "we're too dependent, it's too complex and there will be a crisis within the next 10 years". That was the original reason Computer Science became a key subject area at Universities, in order to tackle the crisis. Of course we all know how influential Universities are in computer and software development. How many project managers go running off to a University to get some help from a professor of Computer Science?

[alluvial]

Nice in theory but costs too much. There are only a certain number of years someone will put up with 0-2% pay rise.

Is that not a contradiction?

Which is why the old way of doing things was better. There were teams of developers putting in new systems and they supported and resolved any issues with them. The knowledge resided in the team and was shared between them. Even if people moved on, there was a sort of dynamic equilibrium as new people came into the team, learnt the ropes and took over when people left. Things started to get screwed when the development and support functions got separated.

[Mich the Tester]

The prediction that systems will get too complex and will cause a crisis have been going since the first wave of computer development in the 1960's.

Arguably they already have done. While I wouldn't suggest the banking crisis or the war in Iraq were caused by computers, which would be ridiculous, an unfounded belief in the correctness of algorithms certainly played a part, as explained in this documentary series.

Anyway, a good systems failure is never a bad thing for contract testers (as long as you're not on that project before things fail).

[alluvial]

The prediction that systems will get too complex and will cause a crisis have been going since the first wave of computer development in the 1960's. It's like peak oil and climate change, at whatever point you look at it people say the same things "we're too dependent, it's too complex and there will be a crisis within the next 10 years". That was the original reason Computer Science became a key subject area at Universities, in order to tackle the crisis. Of course we all know how influential Universities are in computer and software development. How many project managers go running off to a University to get some help from a professor of Computer Science?

I don't believe that there will be a single crisis that brings down all the world's computer systems. I do believe though that we will see more occurences of major organisations having incidents that cause anything from serious embarassment to commercial diasater.