| > Honestly I'm not sure what a good solution would look like, but I don't think it's as simple as "trust us." Maybe not, but "treat me as a liar" doesn't seem viable either. Any time you take an extra measurement you introduce a chance for that measurement to be in error. If you make that it so that any single measurement is a show-stopper, then every time you add an extra check you make things a little bit worse, right up to the point where your false positive rate overwhelms your data. Even with an extremely low error rate, the number of best deals in the world for a given thing is 1. If the goal of your system is to get that, then making any measuring system a single point of failure that tests once is a death sentence. If the number of good and honest software houses that will respond to your call is low, then your false positive rate is going to be extremely high... and again, having such a system is going to be ill-advised. Especially if the system itself suffers from not having the people who are actually going to be using the system, and people who understand how the systems should be created and run, making at least part of the decisions. If there were a greater degree of feedback between procurement, requesters, and providers, with the ability to modify the plan, then you could potentially check your work - reducing the consequences of such failures. Not "absolute trust," but at least "hear my side of the story, maybe you've just misunderstood something." |