Comments on: Believe Defect Free Code is Possible

By: Francis

Francis — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 04:50:49 +0000

Although I don’t believe in totally “bug” free software, I believe high quality software can be reached practically. I have seen so many quality software produced by good developer with quality in mind. They simply put effort into explore the potential problems that can dream of and put in place logics to handle it. It is also a basic norm that the unexpected should be handled graciously. This lead to the robustness of products, i.e. quality.

However, today’s attitude has changed totally. Don’t do anything that has not been asked. If the product has a warranty period of 10 days, don’t make it work for more than 10 days. It is because the company want customers to buy another one after the warranty period.

Therefore, if you have asked a feature or capability to handle an exception, don’t expect the product can.

By: Bill Miller

Bill Miller — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 23:06:13 +0000

We take for granted the high quality in so many of the products we rely upon in our daily lives, but if they had the quality of many of the software products we use every day, we’d never tolerate it. I’ve always wondered why software seemingly gets a free pass.

In the early days of the internet, like most everyone else, I wanted to see Netscape succeed, and I used their software exclusively for web browsing, but it would always crash. One day I became so terribly frustrated that I started to use Internet Explorer. It never crashed. From then on, I never went back. Low quality has a price when there are alternatives. High quality software is easily a market differentiator and one easy way for companies to secure a competitive edge, but for some reason, most leaders of companies miss it.

Thanks for commenting Lenny. Lenny was the director of the product that inspired the article “No Pain, No Gain.” With Lenny managing, there was no doubt that quality was important and he was willing to take the pain for the gain. If you’re looking to build great, high quality products, Lenny’s one of the top guys for the job.

By: Lenny Kaplan

Lenny Kaplan — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 00:42:53 +0000

Long, long ago I had to motivate a newly formed team to produce quality software. In those days when an application crashed so did the entire PC, and developers just accepted rebooting their PC as a necessary part of each user’s work day. We were building a financial terminal for Wall Street and loss of the service, even for a few minutes because our application crashed, could mean significant financial loss for the client if the market moved during the outage. The client would then curse at our field technicians and throw out our product in favor of a competitor. A young developer sitting at their desk far from Wall Street could never fully appreciate that. Back then none of us owned a single share of stock. Instead I told them to think of their application as they do their refrigerator. How would they feel if when they got home from work their refrigerator had shut down, their frozen food thawed, and all they had to do to fix it was to push a little button to restart it. They understood that simple analogy and to this day some 20 years later some team members still remember trying to make their code as solid as as their refrigerator. Quality starts and ends with management support.