"Richard O'Keefe"
If you have a low level of trust, you'll need a great level of detail, and it still won't help.
Heh. Keep your friends close, your enemies closer. Freelancing, I was always paid per hour, not per feature. From my experience, writing something like "The contractor will work closely with an employee designated by Foo to ensure formal and informal, known or yet to be discovered, specifications are implemented" is the best thing you can do. If you have it, mention your QA and its guidelines. If you don't have it, get both. [1] It's more than enough to boot a bad teamplayer out of his contract, doesn't induce frowns in top coders (SNAFU, as those are the ones you want to hire), does not risk mis-specifying requirements (which, with legal backing, is also SNAFU) and doesn't take longer and/or cost more to work out than the program itself (SNAFU, again). Be sure that not only bugs are fixed, but the reasons they appeared in the first place, too: That's the secret people writing space shuttle control software and similar use. [1] Even if it's just one guy working out things like "Every function must be documented" and me getting a bug report saying "Help text does not mention how to display help text". -- (c) this sig last receiving data processing entity. Inspect headers for copyright history. All rights reserved. Copying, hiring, renting, performance and/or quoting of this signature prohibited.