They are bound to take the most economical offer which is not necessarily the cheapest. Cost must always be a significant factor but others can be included. The criteria must be fixed before starting the process and can include follow-up cost, technical aspects, environmental considerations, duration, user experience, or anything else that is quantifiable, appropriate, and non-discriminatory.

It is far easier to just look at the cost but it's absolutely not uncommon to have other criteria included in a tender.

An offer that is unusually cheap has to withstand additional scrutiny. It is not allowed to choose such an offer (even if it's the cheapest) if it's price-dumping or unlikely to be completed due to the tight calculation.

Yes, but that's only half of the story. We just spent 40 mio on a thing that had 10 year old cabling contracts. We managed to fix it, but there's plenty of trash that we didn't manage to fix. The problem is that there is close to zero accountability on senior management.

Germany is full of stuffed old guys, who have no reason to be afraid of ANYTHING. Nothing is ever going to happen to them. All the people that screwed up the major government construction projects went straight to go on to continue doing the next government construction projects. Same with every other industry here.

Blaming the "Ausschreibung" or bidding stuff is only a tiny part of the problem. Every time I see the people responsible for this crap I almost puke when I see them give each other a pat on the back.

Oh and while I'm at it. We have a software contractor that has a contract that basically lets them build anything they want and bill it to us. Add to that I'm supposed to architect their software and micromanage, so they get to bill us for the work. On top of it we pay them to get training in Angular 2.0, which we will then pay for to have them train us. I asked management to change the contract so they couldn't do what they want, but they just don't want to touch it.

They were not chosen as part of the bidding process btw. I've seen the same in the US. It's the same crap you have in any other country.

To be fair, that is more a rationale for having rally good people speccing your system and producing detailed requirements.

Ok, let's just do that : spec a voting system. Such a system should be as secure as physical paper and anybody should be able to assess its security by inspecting it (good luck with that one).

The level of detail your talking about to prevent the kind of mistakes they made is so specific that you might as well just develop the thing in house since you clearly already have the experience.

Maybe what we need is a rules that any critical government infrastructure should be independently pen tested before it's bought. This should hopefully put off the inexperienced from taking on such projects and offer a way out for governments should the contract go sour.

I agree, this is often an issue. In my company a lot of people only make specs, and the "development" for a lot of components is outsourced. But these specs are basically developed already, so in the end, we're only making the expensive developers write a spec that's so detailed that it's more work to write the detailed spec, than if you programmed it directly from a non-detailed spec.

That's certainly not wrong, but it also is somewhat at odds with how we know modern software projects should be managed, which is a reasonable explanation for why so many government projects work out the way they do.