[Haskell-cafe] Maybe off-topic -- Writing contracts or software specifications

[Cristiano Paris]

On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 3:07 PM, Maurí­cio <briqueabraque at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> ...
> Are there ways already accepted by practice on how to write
> software contracts? It's a small program to acquire and show
> data from a device, a one person, two months work. I like the
> guy we are going to hire, and much to my surprise he sugested
> using Haskell for the task. But he also do not have experience
> writing such documents.

It depends on how clear and stable are the requirements for the
application that must be developed.

If they are very clear and you think they're not going to change
during development, then you can go for a contract having the product
itself as the subject: you'll describe the application, stating all
the requirements and the acceptance tests for each of them. But be
careful: requirements in the software field are very hard to state
clearly and you might end up with yourself spending a lot of time and
effort just to figure out which are to be included and how they're
best described.

On the contrary, if you have only a vague idea of what the software
should do, then I advice you to hire the person for a certain amount
of time. Hence, you're supposed to collaborate closely with this
person to get the job done, mostly controlling the development. In
order to incentivate the person to finish the job before the end of
the contract, I'd put a big bonus if the software satisfies you. The
downside is that you must spend a lot of time in the project and be
competent in evaluating the person's skills for the project, otherwise
you'll end up with paying a person who is basically useless to you.
Maybe you can get help in evaluating the programmer from a friend or a
collegue.

Anything between these two forms of contracts is likely to fail.

My 2 cents.

Cristiano