Excerpt from Chapter 5: Describing Your Software for Outsourcing

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools. - Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

What if you could outsource your software development and have a guarantee that the results would be successful? That would be very powerful indeed.

A guarantee is one of the most attractive enticements you can offer your customers to help them decide to buy your product. Actually, marketing folks give such incentives the fancier name of “risk reversal,” since they are meant to reverse the feeling of risk within your customers. Whatever you offer as a risk reversal should make them feel that it is less risky to do business with you than it is to continue on their present course. The customer should feel that they have a great deal to gain and very little to lose.

The most common risk reversal is a guarantee. (A free trial is another common risk reversal technique). With a guarantee, not only will your customer get the benefits of your product or service for a reasonable price, but they are also promised guaranteed results.

Do you offer some kind of risk reversal for your business? Perhaps you guarantee the major benefits offered by your software. Or you may offer a free trial for some limited period of time. The more you work to earn the trust of your customers, the easier you will make it for them to do business with you.

Why don’t most software outsourcing service firms offer a guarantee? Because developing custom software on time is notoriously difficult to do. An on-time delivery guarantee is virtually never offered for software development, and it would seem hard to believe if it were.

This is mainly because the end goal of a software development project is difficult to define and is not often completely known at the beginning.
The competence and ability of the software engineers is rarely the issue, especially if you have carefully selected your vendor using the techniques described in Chapter 3.

The key, you might think, is in defining your software as carefully as possible. If you do this well, it seems, you will reverse your risk in outsourcing your software development. But it is not always so simple.

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