Ask HN: Non tech founders, how do you assess the quality of your software?
As a non-technical founder without enough resources and work to justify hiring your own software engineers, entrusting an agency or freelancers to build the software powering your startup; how do you assess whether you are getting your money worth?<p>Specifically:<p>1. How do you make sure that the software isn&#x27;t a giant unmaintainable spaghetti mess that will cripple you later as you grow and want to add features?<p>2. How do you assess whether the software will be easy to extend and maintain in the future, not necessarily using the same people&#x2F;agency who built it?<p>3. How do you tell if the stack choices the agency&#x2F;freelancers made are the right ones for your application and the future?<p>4. Even though it works well and looks good in the demo, how do you tell if it will go the distance or constantly crash and be down?<p>5. How can you tell how expensive it will be to run? I have heard and read that AWS can get very expensive, very fast.<p>6. How important is all the above altogether? Is it acceptable that your first version is pretty much a throw-away and that you&#x27;ll rebuild it all from the ground up once you have your own software team? What if you don&#x27;t plan on getting a software team at all (not a tech company at the core) but still want dependable software?<p>Any experience you could share on the above (both good and bad)?<p>Thanks!