22.6
Fun story! I worked as a web development intern for an office on campus a few years ago, and my job was to fix the terrible website that the office had paid for. The contract with the website designer was set at a fixed price, and our office staff had apparently changed their user requirements several times during the development process so that the developer basically just said, “I’m done, here you go” and delivered a dysfunctional website. Thankfully, this was a new domain that was not yet public, so the office had time to fix the problem. I had a good time learning php by reverse engineering the developer’s completely undocumented and uncommented custom Wordpress theme. So, fun and useful for me but super bitter for the office and probably for the developer as well, who I assume is doing just fine. This ill-fated adventure seems to blend several lessons from requirements engineering, project management, and risk management.