Software Quality

Lately I’m involved in a side project for my son’s school web site. It is a simply basic thing and my part was to observe that the school gets a final result that is possibly to maintain and grow when needed. Decision was made to go with a specific “service provider” that would create the solution. It was agreed on ASP.NET 3.5 – simple.

Boy was I surprised by incompetence and, what’s worse, by unbelievable lies, the school was fed during some 4 weeks of the project.

Project was running on Assembla (for Subversion repository). “Service provider” has provided us with the following final result, where a quite a few files were just plain missing… The cool part was the answers from the “service provider” for a few questions I threw out there to question there credibility. For example, the awesome answer to my question “how come files were missing” and Default.aspx as a concrete example, the answer was:

“The Default page is not being used so we have not committed to the repository.”

Amazing. Now these people claim to have “hundreds of successfully delivered projects”. Right…

Bottom line – software business is one of those where a nice wrapper can deceive a client about the quality of solution sold. Looks like some “solution providers” are taking advantage of that, completely ruining opinion about software development in general.