Can’t have your cake and eat it too!

If you have gone through any of these project bidding and freelancing sites like RentACoder, Guru, etc., you will definitely come across hundreds of projects in which the clients have the following requirement:

The application must be of very good quality and very cheap also.

This is generally followed by a line which states that if “you deliver timely, good quality software which is also cheap, we will give you more projects in the future”.

I thought to myself – cheap and good quality… How does this possibly work?
(In my opinion, quality never comes cheap!)

There can possibly be two reasons for people posting this:

1. People posting on such sites have extremely low expectations of the end product.
   If their definition of good quality is something which plain works, then I guess this point holds true. There are lots of companies out there doing really shoddy work – believe me – I have seen (20+ developers) software sweatshops which produce such low quality applications that some kids learning a new technology, hashing out their first application over a weekend would do a far better job.
2. People posting have truly no clue …
   In this case, the people really want good quality software – but they have no clue on how much it actually costs to develop it. These people would be the most disappointed of the lot because more often than not, some desperate company or freelancers choose to do the project in the measly amount they’re paying and what they get in the end is really shoddy software (which eventually drives them to the category 1 people above).

Writing excellent software is a decently intensive process with thousands of things going into it.
At a birds-eye level, you need to do your research well, work up a good architecture, code well and finally test it thoroughly.

Moral of the story is that you cannot have your cake and eat it too!
If you want to get something done cheaply, you either have to cut down on the features (a highly recommended option) or settle for something which you need to cross your fingers hoping that it does not crash and burn.