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Ask HN: Why is software quality an afterthought for many people/companies?

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Re: Ask HN: Why is software quality an afterthought for many people/companies?

#31

Post by fsloth »

pjc50 wrote: post #8

Software development is, apart from a few rare outposts like GOV.UK, conducted in the private sector for a profit. That means that the number one consideration for the software is profitability. For internal-only software, this means that cost is the prime consideration. In support of that, often software startups are trying to capture a winner-takes-all market, so time-to-market is critical. Thirdly, consumer protec…

"aerospace people can usually get it right "

Are you refererring to adherence to standards like Misra and DO-178B or something else?

Re: Ask HN: Why is software quality an afterthought for many people/companies?

#32

Post by pjc50 »

alok-g wrote: post #23
pjc50 wrote: post #8

Software development is, apart from a few rare outposts like GOV.UK, conducted in the private sector for a profit. That means that the number one consideration for the software is profitability. For internal-only software, this means that cost is the prime consideration. In support of that, often software startups are trying to capture a winner-takes-all market, so time-to-market is critical. Thirdly, consumer protec…

Only thing I can add (indirectly covered in your comment) is that software companies are competing with each other too. So once quality vs. price bar gets set, it is hard for another company to offer a better quality while asking for a higher price. This is one of the reasons how a lot of software has gotten to ad-funded. Dan Ariely (author of the book Predictably Irrational) called allowing free apps on AppStores to…

Theoretically software products could compete on "quality", but this is quite rare because it's hard for the customers to measure. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

I don't agree with the idea that free apps are inherently bad - that would rule out Open Source / Free Software, and it would also put the boundary vs "free" web pages in a strange place.

"Free"+adsupported and "Free"+IAPs have certainly produced some strange and terrible incentives though. As has the incredibly bad discovery process on app stores.

Re: Ask HN: Why is software quality an afterthought for many people/companies?

#33

Post by alok-g »

m12k wrote: post #6

To most businesses, the core objective is creating a profitable business, and most other objectives, including engineering, marketing, support, and yes, in many companies even things like customer and employee satisfaction, are secondary to that, and only really prioritized to the extent that improving those areas also improves the bottom line (I would in fact argue that this is true of almost all companies, and that…

>> piece of software that mostly does what the customers want even if it is low-quality

The state of the software is currently much worse in my opinion.

Quality is not easily quantified while the price is. Metrics at the customer end are hard to collect (it requires software development too, raising the costs), and in the current state of the art, it also requires having customer support staff too which is still costlier. As a result, quality does not even gets quantified properly. A natural result of which is quality reducing below what would customers desire.

This isn't much different than where quality of MP3 players, laptops and smartphones was headed. Perhaps quality then was being measured just by percentage of customer returns, not by customer satisfaction. Steve Jobs then changed the game. Apple's products would just "feel right" to the customers. Apple iPod took over the market even after being much costlier. It then took a couple years for the rest of the laptop/smartphone manufacturers to catch up.

Re: Ask HN: Why is software quality an afterthought for many people/companies?

#34

Post by dasmoth »

jonsen wrote: post #13

Did you ever hear: "I love to code", "Writing code is so much fun" ? Software is not made by grownups. And for the most part the development is not managed by grownups. The problem is that so many can get away with childish behaviour.

This doesn't quite say, but seems to imply, that if all software was written by people punching in and our every day and having no fun whatsoever, software quality should improve.

I'm unconvinced by this argument. Maybe compliance with "best practices" would improve a bit, but I see very little evidence that the results would be good for the average user.

I'm pretty certain, for example, Rich Hickey was having fun at least some of the time when building Clojure -- his belief in it is palpable whenever I've seen one of his talks -- yet it's an incredibly well-thought-out, solid piece of software.

Lots of classic games were passion projects of an individual or a very small and close-knit team. Whether that's "quality" I guess depends on perspective. For me, a lot of classic games very definitely were, though (and a bug or two doesn't necessarily detract from the overall experience).

Re: Ask HN: Why is software quality an afterthought for many people/companies?

#35

Post by alok-g »

pjc50 wrote: post #32
alok-g wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only thing I can add (indirectly covered in your comment) is that software companies are competing with each other too. So once quality vs. price bar gets set, it is hard for another company to offer a better quality while asking for a higher price. This is one of the reasons how a lot of software has gotten to ad-funded. Dan Ariely (author of the book Predictably Irrational) called allowing free apps on AppStores to…

Theoretically software products could compete on "quality", but this is quite rare because it's hard for the customers to measure. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons I don't agree with the idea that free apps are inherently bad - that would rule out Open Source / Free Software, and it would also put the boundary vs "free" web pages in a strange place. "Free"+adsupported and "Free"+IAPs have certa…

We are mostly in agreement. See my other comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15532543

I do find open-source software to be generally lower in quality than paid products. Though there are many exceptions at this point in time where open-source is rather highly superior.

However, even in cases where someone could produce a better paid software for an open-source alternative, they practically cannot as it is hard to compete with free.

Re: Ask HN: Why is software quality an afterthought for many people/companies?

#36

Post by zdragnar »

The difference in money, and perhaps more importantly, time, between great software and good-enough software is large enough that most companies will require good-enough.

There are two big trade-offs in time alone: missing the chance to be first to market (mongo vs rethink comes to mind, albeit not quite accurate), and the need to get feedback early and often enough to pivot if the idea isn't quite right.

Then the layers of lava come- not enough time to rewrite everything now that the domain is better understood, the prototype becomes the foundation, and cruft builds up.

Re: Ask HN: Why is software quality an afterthought for many people/companies?

#37

Post by pjc50 »

fsloth wrote: post #31
pjc50 wrote: post #8

Software development is, apart from a few rare outposts like GOV.UK, conducted in the private sector for a profit. That means that the number one consideration for the software is profitability. For internal-only software, this means that cost is the prime consideration. In support of that, often software startups are trying to capture a winner-takes-all market, so time-to-market is critical. Thirdly, consumer protec…

"aerospace people can usually get it right " Are you refererring to adherence to standards like Misra and DO-178B or something else?

Yes, that kind of thing. The observed failure rate is pretty low although there have been a few high profile incidents (A400M, the whole Chinook fiasco http://www.computerweekly.com/blog/Public-Sector-IT/One-of-t... )

The Chinook fiasco is, like most quality issues, really a project management fiasco. The decision to do special software rather than get Boeing to do it, then a series of oversight failures on known problems.

Re: Ask HN: Why is software quality an afterthought for many people/companies?

#38

Post by [deleted] »

fsloth wrote: post #31
pjc50 wrote: post #8

Software development is, apart from a few rare outposts like GOV.UK, conducted in the private sector for a profit. That means that the number one consideration for the software is profitability. For internal-only software, this means that cost is the prime consideration. In support of that, often software startups are trying to capture a winner-takes-all market, so time-to-market is critical. Thirdly, consumer protec…

"aerospace people can usually get it right " Are you refererring to adherence to standards like Misra and DO-178B or something else?

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Why is software quality an afterthought for many people/companies?

#39

Post by rahimnathwani »

pjc50 wrote: post #8

Software development is, apart from a few rare outposts like GOV.UK, conducted in the private sector for a profit. That means that the number one consideration for the software is profitability. For internal-only software, this means that cost is the prime consideration. In support of that, often software startups are trying to capture a winner-takes-all market, so time-to-market is critical. Thirdly, consumer protec…

Fourthly, a lot of software is ""free"" or ad-funded. This further weakens the cost of failure.

I'm not sure being ad-funded weakens the cost of failure. Losing users or having down time impacts revenue immediately if you're ad-funded.

Re: Ask HN: Why is software quality an afterthought for many people/companies?

#40

Post by melenaos »

Unfortunately most of the business people are in a hurry to release a new feature or version.

There is a misconception that code quality comes in a price of developing time but in my experience I have released much faster the final product when I use unit testing, incremental releases, use code reviews and other techniques that help maintain the code quality high.

By not using these techniques you get faster initial release but a much slower final, bug free, release.

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