enterprise distribution

[david at thekramers.net (David Kramer)]

Jerry Feldman wrote:

> But, back to quality and marketing.
> The lack of quality is also expensive. In the short term, it increases 
> support costs. In software, if a design flaw is caught early in 
> development, then it can be corrected relatively inexpensively. If it ships 
> and that flaw is discovered later on, the cost of fixing it might be very 
> high. Additionally, poor quality products over a period of time will 
> counteract that marketing budget as Detroit discovered.

Yup.  That's one of the ways Agile/XP makes up for some of the extra process 
time: Catch more bugs early on, and it costs a whole lot yet.  Two of my 
partners were on an embedded project that used some of the Agile practices 
(Agile and XP did not formally exist at the time), and they had something 
like 15 bugs discovered after release in three years.  That's not bad, 
considering the complexity of the application.

Also consider that finding and fixing bugs late in the development cycle is 
expensive, but finding and fixing bugs after the product is released, maybe 
even two or more releases later, *much* more expensive, especially when you 
consider the high turnover in a place like MSFT.