Final Thoughts From FOSE 2008
FOSE 2008 is over, and we’re all back home. Here are my observations from the final day of FOSE 2008:
- It would have been nice to have our people attending more sessions. Arin Sime got to attend a couple of sessions, and Eric Pugh saw the opening keynote speech, but it would have been nice to attend more sessions to get the government point of view of information technology.
- The attendees have a general distrust of custom solutions. It’s not a wonder. They probably suffer from vendor lock, unresponsive clients, and have generally been burned by bad process.
- There are pockets of Agile development, but not many. This probably leads to the problem cited above, but it also reflects a greater problem…
- Contracting officers don’t know how to price Agile development. The most common pricing scheme for development projects is fixed price. Agile can only deliver a fixed price for labor. Maybe it will be easier under a blanket purchase agreement or with sprint-sized task orders.
It’s too early to say whether this was a worthwhile trade show for us. Each day, we definitely had conversations where people had specific problems that they were trying to solve which our team and process could help them solve. Whether or not we can get from problem identification and solution provider acknowledgment to actually providing the solution remains to be seen.
Tags: 541511, custom computer programming, FOSE, FOSE 2008, Government, government computing, government open source