OSHA App Costs Gov't $200k 234
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."
Re:This sounds like an article (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't know about that... Android and iOS offer very easy to work with developer APIs, I have personal experience. In 5 lines of code on iOS you can request the GPS location of the phone, then you just query the weather data from a public source... never done this personally, but I am sure there are weather data providers available for cheap or free....
If all this app does is display the weather, and display hardcoded recommendations based on that weather, any competent developer could have this done in a day... of course since this was a more professional job there is far more people involved, so with all the beurocratic nonsense that goes into your average disfunctional R&D unit I would be surprised if this took more than 2 weeks.
Just downloaded the Android version (Score:5, Interesting)
Code is posted (Score:5, Interesting)
Here is a link to the code [osha.gov]
There's probably a reason it's calculating 140F in boston.
Re:wow, a guy made a mistake (Score:5, Interesting)
You have it wrong.
If a budget has been approved, the bureaucrats have an incentive to award the bid that exactly matches the budget, because otherwise next years budget will be cut.
You would be amazed at what gets approved at the end the year of a well run department that is well under budget. (at least I always am.)
Re:Sounds reasonable. (Score:4, Interesting)
That said, it's easy these days to spend more than you need to on iOS development. And in the grand scheme of things I don't think the amount they overspent is that crazy, especially considering there's probably some overhead just because it's the government. I'm sure a lot of companies are overspending when getting apps made.
Re:Summary can't add (Score:2, Interesting)
Government program manager here. 2 sources of this problem. It probably cost the contractor that much to meet the requirements; in this case I'd not jump all oevr the desire to blame the dirty contractors, unless they are NG.
1) Acquisition law is so fucking complex that everything they write has to be internally audited and vetted by a contractor.
2) IT acquisition regulations are built to prevent bad program managers from letting a contract for a bad system. Therefore, they are so complex that you can not buy a simple system. Everything from the UI design has to be specified, and someone has to be paid to write those specifications.
3) The requirements creep for almost every government acquisition is retardedly huge. While you think it would be nice to have a page to tell you how to stay in the shade, my SOW (Statement of Work) will be bounced back if it doesn't specify what languages the text will be written in, what accessibility measures it will accomodate, what the objectives of the text are, and a plan to archive all of that data. It also includes a meeting for me to review your proposed text.
4) Yes, I am required by law to require you to have a certified quality assurance plan. You can self certify, but you have to have a quality assurance plan that conforms to industry standards. You get to pick which standards, but in my line of work, DO-187B is the standard standard, and it completely prohibits things like agile, and prototyping.
5) There is a list of standards a yard long for user interfaces. None of them are rational or complete. I pull one out of my ass, which in my line of work actually means pay someone to do a study to determine which standard should be used and what information should be displayed in what manner.
6) Even though you think this is a smartphone app, I must treat it like a federal IT system, and ensure IA (Information Assurance) compliance, contractually. Therefore, you have to run the whole gauntlet of documentation to demonstrate best practices, even if you still don't do input validation.
The poor fuck who bought this seems to have gotten off relatively cheap. Don't blame him; he followed the law. You idiots voted for the idiots who wrote the law, or abstained. If he had been a little more creative, he could have cut the cost of the prorgam in half by contracting a service instead of an IT system. However, that would have required the money be a different color, and I shit you not, potentially congressional legislation to change the color of money. Hell, he was probably forced by department or agency rules to waste 100 man hours to do a code re-use study. And in the end, if he had cut the cost in half, he would not have gotten any reward besides the warm fuzzy that he stuck it to the man by snookering him to save money, as he drank himself to sleep.
Who's astroturfing this story? (Score:4, Interesting)
I see plenty of comments on how reasonable or unreasonable the price is, and they are interesting. I generally agree it doesn't seem that out of whack price wise for a working application supported for some time period.
What I find more interesting is this story is being posted all over the web all of the sudden:
And of course here on /.
Hitting that range of sites (and more) with this sort of non-story story trying to push a narrative of the government is wasting your money? Someone behind the scenes is pushing this narrative, I suspect. Not news for nerds, but manufactured political outrage.