Computer Aided Call for Tenders: A Tool for Software Bidding

Abstract

Under a broad comprehension of Software Engineering, it is preferred the term software life cycle instead of just software production. The reason is that cycle starts at software conception and stops when the software is relegated. Given contemporary companies’ market strategies of focusing on their competitive advantages, most of them have externalized their software production to outsourced services. Therefore, the call for software tenders has become a common step in the software life cycle. In this paper, we present a tool which aids non-experts to specify call for software tenders. The motivation was Chile situation of most of rural and semi-urban city halls which do not have engineering teams to build call for software tenders. We describe the problem in terms of lack of competitiveness and empty biddings generated by low quality calls for tenders. As a second step, we show the technical considerations to develop the proposed tool and its features. We include an initial tool perception from a first group of users.