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Old 04-02-2014, 11:19 AM  
DannyA
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Join Date: Oct 2005
Posts: 85
If you wanted an exact clone it could be done for next to nothing, but the most important thing is you get someone who has the knowledge to plan and execute the project correctly. Even though you want a flat rate for the project, a good consultant will always work hourly. Most of the skill involved revolves around evaluating your needs, establishing requirements, then taking some sort of agile approach to create iterations, evaluate them, and change the requirements as needed.

If you want an exact clone with no potential for changing requirements, you could pay someone $10 an hour but this is almost never the case. You realize you're not actually going to meet your needs as a businessperson and your guy gets sloppy trying to accommodate you. These things add up and most of the time a software project will actually just never get completed while you've paid for hundreds of hours of work.

On the other hand, someone might demand $200/hr but that's what someone who can manage a software project start to finish is really worth. The fact that they set themselves up to adapt easily combined with them just being better at actually writing the code may mean you get your product in 10 hours of work spread out over a week of brief meetings and evaluations instead of someone cheap going 200 hours before declaring it doomed.

Basically, don't trust anyone cheap and gauge who you go with based on how they approach estimating the price. They should be asking a lot of questions and should be able to tell you what their process is. You want to hear words like agile, scrum, etc.
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