I have to love the folks lecturing you about how you should use this or that platform, or saying you are ignorant of his or that magic bullet practice that will solve all the problems.

Surely it’s proof that the quality of their reasoning is dead… without knowing you, your background and experience they jump to the conclusion that the problem is ‘YOU’ and not the software/os/etc. Lovely ‘blame the user’ mentality there, which I think is yet another aspect of the underlying problem. (reminds me of the advert slamming the cable companies. ‘we need better customers, ones who don’t want so much from us’.

I’ll disagree on two points however.

1) security isn’t worse.. it’s far better than it was.. However the landscape is far far worse than it was 15 years ago, by orders of magnitude. So the net result is that we are more likely to experience a problem. 15 years ago you could put a system up ‘naked’ without a firewall on the internet and be just fine. if you put that same system up there now, the ‘time to ownage’ could likely be measured in minutes.. (and I don’t care if it’s a windows system, or a mac or a unix/sun/*nix box, they would ALL get owned in fairly short order if they were running an OS from 15 years ago without any patches since that time)

2) users are stupider.. well maybe that’s not fair, lets say ‘not technologists’ shall we? 15 years ago you had to be computer literate to use a PC of any variety, even mac’s of that era required some level of savvy from the user. The average user in those days was far more skilled than the average user today.. And the system did far less then, there was less to go wrong, fewer places for things to break. Now I’m not sure if that trend towards less literate users has accellerated faster than the improvements in usability and self diagnostics, but one thing is for sure, when something goes wrong, the average user of today is far less equipped to deal with the problem in terms of experience and troubleshooting skills, than the average user of 15 years ago.

we’re also running more programs and a greater variety of hardware, all of which increases the potential for adverse interactions, so the potential for problems has increased (e.g. the pairwise test set would be substantially larger)

there’s other trends in terms of landscape change that have affected us also, such as slimmer margins for computer makers that have forced them to seek additional revenue by preloading new systems with tons of crapware..

but still I think your fundimental point remains true, it seems a lot of companies have either given up on quality, or drunk the cool-aid and fallen hook/line/sinker for some bogus silver bullet (automate all testing, offshore it all, replace testers with unit tests and tdd, etc).. There are anti-patterns to this, such as the agile notion that the entire team is responsible for quality, not just the QA guys at the end of the cycle, and I think largely they are headed in the right direction, but if the upper level management doesn’t give a hoot, and doesn’t fund time and energy for quality, those things are doomed to fail (imho anyway)

–Chuck

I remember a Technology Review article on the topic, maybe five years ago?, that came to the same conclusion for very similar reasons: Given the classic three-way tradeoff (quality, price, time), customers demand poor quality NOW and look for competition on price.

I’ve lived through this problem for fifteen years now. I’ve tried to find companies to work at where quality is forced to matter because the customers demand high quality and look for competition on price and time. It’s been a long and generally unrewarding road. It’s probably safe to say that I’ve turned from a highly productive, ambitious, helpful tester to an angry, frustrated, morally corrupt smartass. I used to give a damn and I miss that. I’m far enough down this path that it’s going to take a big kick to either go another path or figure out how to make the path I’ve chosen bother me less.

Please hurry up and get on with your ideas on the “what to do about it” part!

–JMike

[James' Reply: Ah yes. I need to write the positive part!]

Thanks…

[James' Reply: I got an HP Netbook thing that only comes with Vista installed. So I was stuck. The next system I got was XP, but in Swedish, and it turns out it's not trivial to change the language to English!]

It is interesting that you are mentioning financial industry, but not in the context of financial software development / testing. Well, as someone working in this industry for more than 10 years I can tell you that the management is very much aware of the consequences of software defects for the companies. Your hypothesis clearly does not apply here as the penalties for low quality of software are pretty steep. Yet in current economic conditions the financial companies behave very similar to those who (as you believe) just gave up on quality. They slash the cost by replacing trained, experienced, smart testers with junior offshore staff. I do believe that they behave rationally, but the explanation is different (and simpler) than yours. In hard times the companies just slow down their development efforts, and they simply don’t need the same level of testing staff for their IT departments. In fact they also cut application development staff albeit not that drastically. My explanation at least gives a glimmer of hope to us testers as the economy will recover sooner or later, and we just need to be properly prepared for that time. We need to sharpen our tools and methodologies, and learn to better articulate the value added by software testing. As new application development projects pick up the speed we should be able to deliver competitive advantage to the companies that care about quality, and by the way hire better software testing staff. If we can not deliver then I am afraid software testing will end as profession.

I wanted to comment on the products you mentioned. I haven’t used Tivo, but I am a Dish subscriber and use the VIP 722. I think it’s an awesome machine, however I keep noticing bugs that confuse me and cause me to sometimes miss shows. The more of a power-user I become, the more bugs I see. I was pretty upset last week when the end of a basketball game I was recording got cut off.

I’ve been a Mac user for the past 3 years, and I have little interest in using Windows unless some program requires it. Apple has had some real issues with hardware, although their software works pretty well. I think this idea that the hardware/software combo has been so thoroughly tested has a lot of merit. I did own an Ipod for a while until it crashed. Now I have a Sony Walkman that has a worse interface, but far superior hardware. I happen to be one of few people who is willing to put up with some clunkiness to get better sound quality. I realize I’m making a trade-off. I do still use Itunes because I love how easily it interfaces with podcasts.

In fact I think our experiences with “pretty good” software like OSX has made everyone less patient with a poor user experience. So I don’t think quality is dead–I just think your company is dead if you aren’t figuring out how to make your users happy. It’s a complicated problem, and I hope product developers take the human aspect seriously.

Do we not sense and realise that our lives are today more complicated, stinkier by the day, falling in value ans substance, cursed and step-by-step rotting away from the (uncontaminated) life that we knew existed say back in the 60s/before. Are we not now witness to scenes of crime/violence/hatred which becomes bloodier and more horrific than the previous one? Vietnam, 9/11, Mumbai terror attack, Winnenden school shooting, & so on…

How do we counter this in our own individual microcosmic way? Do we give up on teaching good values to our children? Do we not stop the sibling fights and not abhor violence of any kind? In a bus, when I see an elderly woman struggling to keep her balance, do I not offer her a seat? When I hear a child speaking profanities do I not admonish even if she is not a blood relation?

Of course I do.

Quality of life is in our hands to a great extent and we must continue to encourage, inspire, instil and ensure that we influence its goodness to the extent possible.

Likewise when a product we are not happy about is readied for release would we not raise a RED flag?

Of course we will.

We will be vehement in giving this information to the powers-that-be supported with defects information, tests undergone/not undergone, plan ahead for testing and so on… When we do this do we not try to protect the user who should better not use the product in its present shape. Do we do this because it is our job? Yes but is that all. I think the voice comes from within & it is equivalent to the scenario of a small boy uttering profanities.

We do our best and we should.

So I do not agree with your “Quality is Dead” completely. As much as the Project/Release Managers will push the buggy products out there would be test professionals (like us) standing in the door wearing and shouting ‘red’. The test professionals may be outnumbered and shooed away but the bugle would have been sounded. Sanity would prevail at times and it would not at others but death – No. We would not let it happen!!!

To me Quality is an attitude, if everyone said well I can’t make this perfect so I am not going to do it all there would be
no value at all created in the world for anyone. The fact that software is valuable despite all the bugs and cost of producing it is self evident.

In general my belief it is at least twice as hard to verify a product then to build it. I have never worked in an environment that recognized this in a put your money where your mouth is fashion. I have joined the test infected crowd and write unit tests for most of my code, I have come to apreciate the difficulty of writing good tests it is a skill set I need to improve upon. Hence why I know who you are since I am considering a career move into testing. Nice talk on becoming a software testing expert by the way loved it.

I never bitch about the quality of products that I have the choice to avoid I think this is pointless I believe in caveat empor buyer beware. I can rant about some of the horrible pieces of software that I am forced to use at work and how they turn something I love to do (writing code) into an utter nightmare sometimes. In defense of these horrible tools (like Rhapsody and Clearcase) someone somewhere made a free market decision to buy these tools they perceive some value in them there perceptions remains a mystery to me and my co workers. Value and quality is in the eye of the beholder and the fact that people pay lots of money for something is the most objective measure of value and quality I can think off. Certaintly commercial success is a better indicator of quality then some quality assurance person giving
their blessing.

I was hoping to contribute to this blog because I felt I had a lot to say. If I have gone off on an unwelcome tangent I apologize again.

Troy

There are some industries out there where ‘it has to work right’ and there’s no way around it. Mission critical embedded systems are a good example…well, most of the time. If the flight system in an F22 goes out, say, because they crossed a particular time zone at a particular time, no one will put up with that, ever. Inquiries, jail terms, and in the worst case deaths appear when people’s lives are on the line and the quality isn’t there.

Here’s the kicker that I’m sure you understand but very few realize: quality in a product doesn’t increase it’s long term cost, it /reduces/ it. The less money you have to pay for support, the less rewriting you have to do, the fewer dependencies you rely on, the less time you spend tracking down issues from year old bugs, the simpler and the stronger your codebase is, the cheaper it gets. Problem is, it takes brains, guts, and time in the short term to move in that direction. Unfortunately, the easy way out is always present.

If a developer did create a reasonably solid operating system, he couldn’t reasonably anticipate selling it in enough quantity to be profitable. To the extent that it wasn’t compatible with the Windows monopoly, the market would reject it just as it has rejected Macintosh and *nix. To the extent that it was compatible, MS would sue it out of existence or buy it and bury it.

Even then, there would be no applications for it. Mac users should be very familiar with this one. Why should I write an application for MacOS when I can write it for Windows and sell ten times the number of copies?

Do not pretend that it’s the market’s fault when the market has never been allowed to function. There are those who WOULD pay $20,000 for a bulletproof OS, if they had that option. There are many who would pay a lot more for something that worked better than this. It’s not available. There are no price points and no options on this graph.

‘Quality’, in so much that it can be measured, costs. If software companies were to apply the same level of ‘quality’ to their software as is applied to say, the software on the mars rovers, it’d be prohibitively expensive for consumers. There’s a cost/benefit trade off, and customers are an equal part of that equation. To the average customer, a few blue screens every once and a while is a good trade off for paying $200 instead of $20,000 for an OS.