[ale] Development contract terms

[Jim Kinney]

I'm pasting in a post from another list I follow (mil-oss for the curious)
and a discussion arose about contract specs Geospatial Intelligence
contract. I found the method of deliverables to paycheck linking described
below was exemplary! As the original author posted it with a "free to use
and embellish" notice, I'm passing it along as part of my embellishments :-)

Begin quote here:

This is a great way to write a development contract.

This one got press, but there are other contracts out there that have been
written in similar ways for other agencies. I'm going to pretend for a
moment that I'm writing a response to an RFP for a government IT effort. As
a contractor, sometimes you have enough wiggle room to write things such as:

The software development project contemplated will be a fixed-duration,
fixed-effort project, following the principles of Agile software
development. Before each two week Sprint begins, Client and Contractor will
collaborate to determine what the highest priority Work Items are.
Contractor will focus on delivering the highest priority Work Items during
the next Sprint. At the end of each Sprint, a User Acceptance Test will be
held for Customer to accept or reject Work Items that Contractor has
nominated as being completed. The number of completed [story points /
completed stories / pick your metric] will determine how many Work Items
will be scheduled for the next Sprint.


The list of requirements listed in Section 4.2.1 will be the starting point
for Client and Contractor to collaboratively write User Stories for Work
Items and that the final delivery may include both items from that list,
and new requirements Client discovers as work proceeds. It is Client's
responsibility to prioritize the Backlog such that the highest priority
items are completed first, subject to technical feasibility as advised by
Contractor.

That's my original language written without reference to any deliverables I
might have worked on in the past, so feel free to use it and adapt it to
your efforts. You might need about 400-1200 words in a 30-50 page RFP
response focusing on Agile delivery, including these items:

Introduction (mention Agile approach)
Agile Software Development Approach (show your Agile chops)
Scope (see above)
Pricing (price it per Sprint)
Glossary (Define terms from approach - Sprints / Iterations, User
Acceptance Test, User Stories, Grooming, etc

Once upon a time I wrote a response like this to an RFP and the firm I was
with partnered with another company on the deal.  Several months later we
were competing with the other company on a different deal. I caught them
copying the agile approach language that I'd written directly from the
first RFP, for their competing proposal! Their apology was genuine so the
names will be withheld to protect the guilty :)
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