A salesforce integration almost never fails on protocol. Authenticating is a solved problem and posting a record is a solved problem. What ends projects is the daily request allocation and the shape of the data model, both usually discovered about three weeks after go-live, when the nightly job starts returning errors...
Custom Software Development
Articles, guides and tutorials on commissioning custom software, covering costs, timelines, contracts and how to choose the right development partner.
Software escrow exists to answer a reasonable fear: the supplier who built and runs your critical system goes out of business, and you are left with something you depend on and cannot maintain. An escrow agreement puts the source code with a third party who releases it to you if that happens. The fear is legitimate....
The choice between a fixed price contract and time and materials is usually framed as a choice about risk, which is correct, and then immediately mishandled, because both sides assume the risk goes away rather than moving. It does not go away. In a fixed price arrangement the supplier carries the risk of the estimate...
A software RFP is supposed to make suppliers comparable. Most achieve the opposite, because they specify a solution in enough detail to constrain the answer while leaving out the information anybody would need to price it. The result is five quotes spanning an order of magnitude, all technically responsive, none of...
Software maintenance cost is the number that turns a successful project into a difficult conversation eighteen months later. The build was budgeted, approved and delivered. What happens after it goes live was described as “support” and given a figure somebody guessed at, and that figure was almost always too small. The...
Technical due diligence is not a code quality competition, and teams preparing for one usually spend their time on the wrong thing. Nobody buying a company is grading your abstractions. They are trying to work out what it will cost to own this system, and how badly it can go wrong after the money changes hands. That...
Fintech software development is priced and scheduled like ordinary software development right up until somebody asks who is authorised to hold the money. At that point the project stops being an engineering exercise and becomes a regulatory one with an engineering component, and the timeline you had in mind stops being...
MVP software development goes wrong at the scoping meeting, not during the build. Somebody says “minimum viable product”, everybody nods, and then the feature list arrives containing user accounts, an admin panel, billing, notifications, a dashboard and a mobile app. That is not a minimum viable product. That is a...
Healthcare software development in the UK costs more and takes longer than equivalent work in any other sector, and the reason is not that the code is harder. It is that a substantial portion of the budget goes on evidence rather than features: clinical risk documentation, information governance, and assurance...
Anyone estimating custom API development cost from the number of endpoints is going to be wrong, usually by a factor of three. Endpoints are the cheapest part. A dozen of them, reading and writing data you already hold, is a fortnight’s work for a competent backend developer. What costs money is everything that turns...