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Many people belive that you can't do a fixed price contract in an
agile project. Since the whole point of an agile process is that
you cannot predict the future, this isn't an unreasonable
supposition. However this doesn't mean you can't come up with a fixed
price agile contract, what it really means is that you can't come up with a
fixed scope contract.
Usually when people say fixed price, they mean fixing price, time, and
scope. This requires detailed, stable, and accurate requirements. The
whole point of agile development is that it works with more fuzzy
requirements. To handle this with a fixed price contract you
essentially come up with a plan that says "we have $x to spend and we
need a release on 1 Dec. We'll collaborate together to come up with
the best set of features to go live with on that date." The initial plan for this kind of arrangement is not really any
different to a predictive project. The essential difference is that we
don't expect things to go according to plan. Instead we expect to
deliver a better product that we can currently envision, because we'll
learn more about the project as the project proceeds. Or if we find things are much tougher, we'll find that out too. In
which case we'll modify the plan. If the customer doesn't like the
resulting plan they can cancel. While this isn't good, they'll usually
cancel earlier than they would under a predictive project, becuase
predictive plans tend to discourage change, and thus make it easier to
not realize when things are going off course. For more read: FixedScopeMirage and ScopeLimbering
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