Complaint Review: Cyber Infrastructure - Milpitas, CA 95035 Select State/Province

In 2013 I hired CIS in India to rebuild a Joomla CMS extension. It two twice as much time and twice as much money to rebuild. The quality of work was horrible. I strongly recommend using an alternative to Cyber Infrastructure, CIS. I've provided a detailed review at www.cisin-sucks.com.

I would have been fine with poor quality that was fast and cheap or high quality that cost a lot. However, this was very poor quliaty for a very inflated price.

What website development project did I hire CIS to program??

In 2009, I hired a company in Viet Nam through Freelancer.com to develop a set of Joomla 1.5 extensions. They did a a pretty good job. Their coding was sloppy but we were able to use the system on Joomla 1.5 for four years. It took them about 750 hours and cost me about $6,700.

I hired Cyber Infrastructure in India to rebuild this extension with the new Joomla 3 framework as follows:

• I hired a full time developer for $8.00 USD per hour. They claimed they worked 170 hours per month for a total of $1,360 per month. That was less than what I paid the developers in Viet Nam four years before so I jumped it. I hired one developer, then bumped that up to two Joomla developers after a couple weeks to speed things up.

• I asked repeatedly, and I was assured multiple times that my programmers were experienced Joomla 3 developers. I was told they had more than four years of coding experience, and that they had done several projects on Joomla 2.5 and already had experience with Joomla 3 that was very new at the time.
  
  *Based on the poor quality of workmanship, I believe I was lied to by CIS.

• I asked CIS to completely rebuild my extensions with the Joomla 3 framework so I could use it for as long as possible without running into compatibility problems with PHP or Joomla 3.

By the time I stopped doing business with them I had paid $12,860 for more than 1,600 hours of work.

What was the quality of work I received from Cyber Infrastructure, CIS in India?

Since discontinuing work with CIS in October, 2013, I have been working with a senior Joomla developer to fix the seemingly endless stream of bugs and issues in the project CIS claimed was "complete".

• Use of Depreciated Functions
  
  One of the most obvious deficiencies is that the CIS developers used "depreciated" Joomla functions throughout the project. These are functions scheduled to be removed from the system that have been replaced with new methods. Using depreciated functions is a sign of developers who are not knowledgeable about the framework. In addition, it set my project up to require expensive upgrading.

• Language Errors
  
  I spent many hours correcting spelling errors and language system errors where values were not defined or the values in the language files didn't match the programming.

• Incomplete Functions
  
  We've found many functions that were incomplete. In one case, the "save" function was a blank function that returned "Hello!". In other cases, there were many redundant functions making it very inefficient.

• Copy-Paste from the old system to the new instead of rewrite
  
  Rather than completely rewriting the extensions as requested, there were DOZENS of instances where the CIS programmers copy and pasted the old code from the Joomla 1.5 extension to the Joomla 3 extension. Rather than fixing everything up and bringing it up to speed, they simply carried the first version coding forward.

• No consistent coding convention
  
  I had hoped that hiring two experienced developers to work together would result in a very well coded and professionally done project. Unfortunately, there was no consistent code formatting used. We've been reformatting and rebuilding functions one at a time to fix and clean up the mess sold to me by CIS.

Based on my experience with Cyber Infrastructure, I believe CIS is not a reputable company and they make their money by taking advantage of entrepreneurs like me who rely on their technical solutions, but lack the programming expertise needed to to verify the quality of their work.

They say they are committed to customer satisfaction, but at what cost? I don't understand why they expected me to pay for them to fix the horrible code they created...