OSHA App Costs Gov't $200k

itwbennett writes "How much does it cost to make a phone app to tell local temperature and suggest how not to get heatstroke, such as drink water and avoid alcohol? If you're the U.S. Government, it'll cost you a pretty penny. Using MuckRock to file a Freedom of Information Act, Rich Jones of GUN.IO discovered the Department of Labor, Occupational Safety and Health Administration paid $106,467 for the Android version; $96,000 for the iPhone version, and an additional $40,000 for a BlackBerry app that never got distributed."

Summary can't add

[Samantha Wright]

The iPhone version was $56,000. The Blackberry version was $40,000. Together, they were $96,000. It says this very clearly in the original scan.

This sounds like an article

[rsilvergun]

By someone that's never written anything more complex than an Excel Macro. Programming is hard. I mean that. I've written some applications myself, and making it reliable (which is kinda the point for something like this) and useful is not that simple. $200k for a professionally built application that runs on reliable on 3 platforms isn't that much. In programming, everything is always harder than you thought it was going to be.

Re:wow, a guy made a mistake

[Anonymous Coward]

If it was in corporate America, whoever authorized it would be fired and the CEO would have some explaining to do to the shareholders. "Nobody" would hear about it since it doesn't really affect anyone.

This, however, is the government wasting everyone's money.

Re:alot of that cost has to be overhead and paper

[Anonymous Coward]

$2000 for the apps and $198,000 for the FAR reporting.

Re:Sounds reasonable.

[greg1104]

Check out How much does it cost to develop an iPhone application? [stackoverflow.com] for a few numbers that are in line with what you roughed out here. There seems cause to complain about the quality of the result, but the price tag itself isn't surprising at all. $150 an hour is also cheap for a good mobile phone developer, given the rampant gold rush speculation driving up salaries in that section of the market right now.

Industrial strength cluelessness

[drstevep]

The only way to describe most of the comments here is "industrial strength cluelessness." As in, the coments' authors don't have a clue about product development. They would have made the Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney movie in the 40s, "Hey, I have a keyboard and Jimmy's dad has a monitor, let's write an app!"

Yes, the government holds contractors on tight leashes. Contract assignment is being done more and more heavily based upon past performance -- your last few contracts were duds, you're less likely to get the next one.

And yes, there is a lot of time spent on product specs. Full life cycle SDLC. Agile development where is is appropriate. Understanding the target before you write a line of code.

Exactly the opposite of what most of the code monkeys making comments above are used to.

So yes, there will be specs written before the product is architected. And it will be written for maintainability. And it will be tested before release. And yes, during the initial development period, this costs money. Because, and remember this, there isn't revenue built into the back end (it isn't "sold" or "advertising supported") to pay for fixes, rewrites, and handling customer complaints.

Disclaimer: I'm a government contractor. I don't code. I'm part of the analysis, review, and verification process. And I've seen a lot of extremely complex systems go out on time and work well when released.

Re:alot of that cost has to be overhead and paper

[sosume]

No. A regular team will set you back around $100k a month: 7 people ($100/hr) just cost 5K daily. That gives you 2 developers, one system engineer, one designer, two testers and one project manager. Two sprints and you've spent the budget.