WARNING... BAD LANGUAGE ... WARNING!
Entirely justified, in my opinion...
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LOL, I’m with the author on his assessment if I were to build it, a good 6 hours development time max X $100-$125/hour. Add in some follow up time for testing and support... For $200K, they should have gotten a whole suite of apps that do more than provide data that can be pulled from a RSS feed.
So, the government has spent $111,600 and have the application in hand. Now they have to pay a reliable company to field test the application, accept or reject it as meeting the original specification, and if they accept it, to train the the trainers in how to use it. Considering all the presentation and training material that will be generated, that's probably going to cost about $100,000 but can be limited by limiting the number of trainers that are initially trained.
Someone will probably get a bonus for keeping the total delivered price below $250,000 which would have put it into a different category and would have driven the cost up even further. Now as for it not working and the interface being crap, that's not an issue unless the specification required that it work and the interface not be crap. If the friendly professor they hired hadn't specified software much there's a good chance that no such specific requirement was included. Live and learn, of course, and after specifying a few he'll get the hang of it and be an even friendlier professor as well. Those agencies that really care about getting quality software the first time pay friendly professors who have retired from the agency that is seeking the software product. In this case, someone figured it was so trivial they'd let a new guy have a shot and you saw the result.
Regards
So, the boss went to the store and paid a few bucks for the model out of his own pocket, and used it a day or two later to explain the problem to his boss in Washington. My brother said that if he had had to get the model through channels, it would have taken weeks, and would have cost hundreds of dollars. Because of a system which is designed to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse.
Liberals went orgasmic when they found out that Grumman made ash trays and charged the government $600 apiece for them. Waste! Fraud!! Abuse!!!
In reality, of course, the paperwork alone to establish permission to put an additional piece in a military aircraft, anywhere for any reason, costs money. You add an ash tray to a dozen planes or fewer, in this case, and it is absurd to suppose that you could possibly design, gain approval, make, and install those ash trays for less than $600 for each. In fact, it turns out that there were sports cars whose manufacturer charged more than that for an ash tray!
In this present case, I'd imagine that nearly all of the cost went into overhead, and time of people who were being underutilized worrying about trifles. But just one court case would surely vindicate having all your i's dotted and your t's crossed. If you use the OSHA temperature work safety app on your iPhone, you can presumably use that fact as a defense in court if ever one of your employees suffers from heat stroke. That just might make it worth it, right there.
Making no representation that I question whether a competent developer could not, using the existing app as a model, create a much nicer app in a week's time . . .