(Paul Tomblin) wrote:
In a previous article, Jim Logajan said:
1) Work mostly fixed-bid software development with payment due only if
the customer accepts the final deliverable (i.e. I take on most of the
risk). I do not require nor expect fully fleshed out requirements (one
of the few things 30+ years of experience should have taught me is
anticipating the probably extent that the scope may change).

In my brief experience trying this sort of thing, this is a ticket to
spending the rest of your life following a constantly changing target
as the user is never satisfied and will never sign off until they are
satisfied.

The main reason I think my customers (at least) don't go into endless
target changing is because the projects address realworld problems they are
having that can't be put off indefinitely.

You must have been very lucky to get reasonable customers.

Very probable - but it may also be the nature of the kinds of projects I've
been doing and my client's underlying motivation. I believe in all the
cases so far my clients had prospects themselves who were interested in new
features or had existing customers who had feature enhancement requests. So
they had strong motivation not to dink around. I suppose that gives some
idea of the kind of work that fixed-bid is best used on.

(Generally a client who constantly changes the target will quickly become a
non-client in short order.)