Practice: Negotiated Scope Contract

Kent Beck wrote:

Here is the final practice.

Write contracts for software development that fix time, costs, and quality but call for an ongoing negotiation of the precise scope of the system. Reduce risk by signing a sequence of short contracts instead of one long one.

You can move in the direction of negotiated scope. Big, long contracts can be split in half or thirds, with the optional part to be exercised only if both parties agree. Contracts with high costs for "change requests" can be written with less scope fixed up front and lower costs for changes.

Negotiated scope contracts are a piece of software development advice. They're are a mechanism for aligning the interests of suppliers and
customers to encourage communication and feedback, and to give everyone the courage to do what looks right today, not do something ineffective just
because it is in the contract. They might be unwise for you at the moment for business or legal reasons. Moving in the direction of negotiated scope
gives you a source of information with which to improve.

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This has become my standard practice, and when I have been able to use it, it has worked very well. I am interested to know about specific variations the community uses.

I generally ask for one month's commitment/investment to give us time to gather a nontrivial amount of information about project pace, customer involvement levels, that kind of thing. After that, I ask for a series of two-week agreements, after any of which, "If you don't like how fast we're going, you must fire us." This line along gets rave reviews.

Often the client counters with a longer contract with a standard 2-weeks' notice termination clause. I can generally negotiate them towards termination at the end of each 2-week iteration, and they're happy with that.

I have read (in the Poppendiecks' _Lean Software Development_) about clauses sharing cost savings for early completion. Who has successfully negotiated that clause into a project? Who has been in the enviable position to exercise it? It seems to me to be a somewhat advanced practice.
--
J. B. (Joe) Rainsberger
Diaspar Software Services
http://www.diasparsoftware.com
Author, JUnit Recipes: Practical Methods for Programmer Testing

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I am a silent reader in the group but this Practice brought up a question I would like to get ideas about.

Now I really like the negotiated scope idea and think that it would be a great help with dealing with private sector clients but I deal with government clients and this Practice will not mesh with the Federal US practices. Any ideas on a compromise between Negotiated Scope and Written-in-Rock scope the government prefers?

Thanks

Chris Woodruff

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Chris,

I had a long discussion about this topic with an experienced manager from a large aerospace company. They said that as long as you had the trust of your contract adminstrator (I think that is the term), you actually had a fair amount of leeway in the details of executing a contract. If not, they would kill you with compliance.

At XP 2003 I met two students at a university in Austria who were writing a pair thesis about XP and public sector contracting in Europe. I don't know what ever became of their work and I can't find their names.

Sincerely yours,

Kent Beck
Three Rivers Institute