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Title: Agile Contracts: Building Trust
Proposer: ewan_milne
Type: Tutorial
Duration: 45 minutes
Description: The Fixed Price contract continues to be the most common means of defining contracts for software development projects, despite the amount of evidence suggesting that such contracts commonly contribute to project failure. Schedule and cost overruns, expensive change control procedures, and a lack of trust between customer and supplier are typical war stories.

Essentially the fixed price contract is based on the same assumptions about a fully predictable, easily planned future as the waterfall model. The Agile movement has gone a long way to breaking down such assumptions in the last decade, so that agile software delivery is now firmly in the mainstream. However, suppliers still often face a struggle to engage customers in a way which minimises contract negotiation and allows real collaboration to begin.

In this session we will look at a number of possible contract models which support an agile way of working to a greater or lesser degree, and explore the issues surrounding the procurement process. Can a contract form the basis of a relationship built on trust and mutual benefit?


Roger: Yes. I suspect it will be of interest to those with either external or 'internal' markets.
Asti: I've seen this question come up several times on various forums. I'd attend