Sky staff are blatant liars!

Moneymaker

I understand databases. Written a couple myself. The usual problem is that the customer (e.g. BskyB) provides a skeleton specification, stating what they want the software to do. Half way through development, they'll send a note "by the way, it needs to support multiroom accounts" then "by the way, it needs to handle 'Anytime+'.."

So the target is always moving and they never want to pay more than the initial estimate, even though they just effectively made you stop and start again from scratch, twice!

Unfortunately, software designed by a committee, on a fixed budget, inevitably fails to satisfy anyone.

We've seen it with the NHS and DVLC ("costs spiralling out of control"). The costs spiral because nobody knows what they want until they see the beta in operation. What companies should do (and probably do) is to quote for the "beta" then quote again for the final version. But companies that give a realistic estimate won't get the work.

MothballsWallet

spike7451 wrote: »

They were still 'updating' the troubleshooting for the broadband months after Sky launched it & we were often telling management that bits of it was wrong,yet it still took them months to add corrections,loads of steps were missing & it took at least 4 months to add Vista when that was launched.
IIRC it was developed in India...

Sounds like SAP then

Moneymaker wrote: »

I understand databases. Written a couple myself. The usual problem is that the customer (e.g. BskyB) provides a skeleton specification, stating what they want the software to do. Half way through development, they'll send a note "by the way, it needs to support multiroom accounts" then "by the way, it needs to handle 'Anytime+'.."

So the target is always moving and they never want to pay more than the initial estimate, even though they just effectively made you stop and start again from scratch, twice!

Unfortunately, software designed by a committee, on a fixed budget, inevitably fails to satisfy anyone.

We've seen it with the NHS and DVLC ("costs spiralling out of control"). The costs spiral because nobody knows what they want until they see the beta in operation. What companies should do (and probably do) is to quote for the "beta" then quote again for the final version. But companies that give a realistic estimate won't get the work.

Had the same thing when I did software development - although I later worked for an MOD List X contractor we didn't have that so much as everything was documented, reviewed, verified with the customer and signed off at appropriate stages.

spike7451

MothballsWallet wrote: »

Sounds like SAP then


Had the same thing when I did software development - although I later worked for an MOD List X contractor we didn't have that so much as everything was documented, reviewed, verified with the customer and signed off at appropriate stages.

Wasn't JPA then...lol:D:rotfl: