[greypowerOz]

I feel the pain. People here will recall the heyday of Paper Prototyping i think. It sounds silly in the 21stC to even suggest such a low tech step, but it's saved my a$$ in the past.... and given me a solid basis to renegotiate a price if/when the feature-creep begins! Anyone else done similar for a client who doesn't _really_ know what they want? ;)

[hinkley]

What always seems to happen is they say, “we want it for this much.” And you say, “that can’t be done… well, it could be done if we can assume all X are Y. Is that okay?” They agree because it means yes. Then a year later they realize that not all X are Y and they start renegotiating, like we’re just arguing about paint colors or bathroom fixtures instead of something foundational, like the footprint or number of floors or what city you built it in (we decided we don’t want to live in Detroit. Can we have it in St Louis instead?).

I have been wondering for a while if we should just never ask those sorts of questions, because they don’t know, we hear what we want to hear, they hear what they want to hear, and nobody has any idea what’s actually going on, and later we won’t look at how we got here.

[Terry_Roll]

IF you cant bill for feature creep on a contract get a new lawyer who can write out better contracts or walk away, some things are not worth the hassle.

You can get a contract for bespoke programming which includes such things as feature creep billing for just a few hundred, its not expensive but if its not written down, you dont have much of a leg to stand on if things ever had to go before a judge or some sort of arbitration unit.

If working in a team, there need to be documented standards for everything from the UX to the DB and everything in between. Its just common sense.

[hinkley]

Time and materials works well, until the customer’s boss figures out they’ve been faffing about for a year and have nothing to show for it.