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I work for a Danish municipality that co-operates a number of open source projects with other muniplacities. I know we’re a niche of sorts, but the setup we app

by jaabe 8y ago

I work for a Danish municipality that co-operates a number of open source projects with other muniplacities. I know we’re a niche of sorts, but the setup we apply is to find small local development houses who can build and maintain our code based, but also sell us hosting. We’ll need a system to handle our vacationflow, with employees reporting it, managers approving it and an integration to our payment system. We’ll handle the business understanding (it involves around 33 different tax laws and some silly organisational culture), the project management and the whole governance around the code base. You do the coding, and then you sell us the hosted solution which you run in Azure or AWS letting our ADFS handle authentication. It’s worked marvellous so far.

shoo 8y ago
> whole governance around the code base Yes, ideally you want to have some highly competent in-house technical ability to assess the quality and maintainability of the codebase that is being produced, separately from the business requirements, otherwise there is a fair chance that you may end up with a lot of low quality code and a system that cannot be safely or cheaply modified. I've seen a couple of organisations outsource development, keeping only project management and domain expertise in house, but having no in house ability to assess the quality of technical work. Don't do that. If your vendors fill your project with the most profitable least experienced/capable developers, after enough years of that you'll get to have exciting meetings about "we're no longer able to estimate how long it will take to make changes to the system".