And in the fitting out there often are things that exist only to get customer feedback (of sales), such as model apartments, sample cubicle layouts etc.

So yes, you are right that engineering can guide us to building something right first time - the hard part from software perspective is usually building the right thing, no the thing right.

An interesting analogy I came across once but could never find again is that with software systems, we’re not building a building, we’re designing a factory that produces an output - the example was a mattress factory that took in raw rubber feedstock & cloth and produced mattresses.

It’s also one of the few from-scratch cloud-first student management solutions.

I think previously these sorts of offshore people were picked up by big bodyshop contractors, who could reliably place someone (and afford to have someone on the bench for a few weeks if needed) - since a massive bunch of government contracts were cancelled over the last few years this mode has dried up.