Agile fixed price contracts

Suitable instruments enable you to reliably plan and budget agile projects. This is why we developed adVANTAGE - an agile value-based pricing model. The result: tailored software where you have an overview of progress, performance and development expenses during the whole development process.

Agile software development centres around one question: Is this feature really needed? The answer that your project team gives to this question is of the utmost importance. The answer identifies the features into which you will be investing your budget for development, testing, releasing and maintenance.

From the perspective of those involved in the project, at least, the advantage of agile development is that plans can be reshuffled to remove or add functions – even late on in a project. Buyers, financial controllers and project managers usually have a different perspective on the matter. They want to be certain of the plan and, consequently, of the budget. Methodologies that distribute the risks between both parties (pain/gain share mechanisms) can resolve this discrepancy and make agility calculable.

We have developed adVANTAGE, an agile, value-oriented pricing model. It offers a combination of flexibility in the area of requirements management with a favourable assumption of warranty and cost. adVANTAGE is the reliable, calculable and transparent solution for companies that wish to implement software projects with the highest possible level of budget compliance yet without the need for a comprehensive specification.

adVANTAGE provides you with what you really need – during development, you can maintain an overview of the progress, performance and development costs and the end product is a streamlined, tailor-made software solution.

Our adVANTAGE model is based on two pillars:

• Effective software development with aspects of agile approaches and tangible progress
• Performance-related billing model with a high degree of flexibility and a constant focus on value

For traditional fixed price models, billing is simple. The service provider is responsible for delivering the contractual object to the agreed level of quality and within the relevant timeframe and budget. In return, the service provider is guaranteed a fixed price. The fixed price model, however, relies on a comprehensive specification and assumes that nothing or only a few things will change over the course of the project. By the time we reach this point, if not before, this billing concept no longer fits with the approaches used in agile software development. There is a need for mechanisms that enable decision-makers to reconcile agility and pricing.