Bespoke Development Agreements

In any development project, the specification is a key document – and it must be part of the contract. Does your customer’s expectations of what they are going to receive actually reflect the solution that you are going to deliver?

Contracts often state that a particular application will be developed, with no specification against which the application will be developed and delivered. Whilst legally you may have delivered something that has the same name as in the contract schedule, your customer is not going to pay for something that doesn’t fulfil his requirement!

This situation can be avoided by agreeing up-front the specification that your team have to deliver to and avoid any claims by your customers that they have failed to do that.

Having agreed that there will be a specification, you should ensure that your business has the final sign-off rights for the draft specification. There is a great risk of being contracted to agree a specification drafted by the customer in respect of which your software will never comply. The agreement and sign-off process should be set out in the contract – making provision for you to include your customer’s input into the specification but leaving the final sign-off to you.

Other provisions relevant to Bespoke Development Agreements can be found in the more general Projects section.