I'd be easy to pile-on with more criticism so I'll do the opposite.
> Nick Van Weerdenburg, CEO and founder of Toronto-based Rangle, said his firm could likely have built the app in less than a month for about $250,000.
> “This is a very simple app,” he said.
Having used ArriveCan I would agree with his quote. It is a very simple app, but what is not simple is writing the specification for it. The contractors weren't given the app and told "how long would it take you to make this?". They were approached to develop "an app to monitor COVID risk at the border", then they had to work with probably several committees, all with different visions and expectations, all trying to get their idea executed.
That's often the part that people forget in favour of easy criticism. ArriveCan is simple, but the process that built it is not, there was no equivalent in the wild that could be used for inspiration, it had a bunch of translation requirements, and needed to interface with existing airport arrival systems.
I'm not saying we should be proud of our government for making a 54M$ CRUD app that, as far as we can tell, did not have much of an impact on COVID being spread, but interviewing a bunch of "IT leaders" and acting as if they would actually sign a contract to build ArriveCan for 250k$ is disingenuous and the Globe and Mail should be ashamed of framing it this way.
> Nick Van Weerdenburg, CEO and founder of Toronto-based Rangle, said his firm could likely have built the app in less than a month for about $250,000.
> “This is a very simple app,” he said.
Having used ArriveCan I would agree with his quote. It is a very simple app, but what is not simple is writing the specification for it. The contractors weren't given the app and told "how long would it take you to make this?". They were approached to develop "an app to monitor COVID risk at the border", then they had to work with probably several committees, all with different visions and expectations, all trying to get their idea executed.
That's often the part that people forget in favour of easy criticism. ArriveCan is simple, but the process that built it is not, there was no equivalent in the wild that could be used for inspiration, it had a bunch of translation requirements, and needed to interface with existing airport arrival systems.
I'm not saying we should be proud of our government for making a 54M$ CRUD app that, as far as we can tell, did not have much of an impact on COVID being spread, but interviewing a bunch of "IT leaders" and acting as if they would actually sign a contract to build ArriveCan for 250k$ is disingenuous and the Globe and Mail should be ashamed of framing it this way.