Responding to “Are bugs and slow delivery ok?”

I've seen bad software and slow delivery lose companies important clients, causing job losses and severe financial problems.

I've also seen companies go out of business because they tried to make perfect software and never actually delivered it to anyone.

The right approach, I think, is to do the minimum necessary and do it very well. Easier said than done though.

Agree.

For example, pg said that ViaWeb was successful because they had put care into their code, which allowed them to iterate quickly and integrate new features that customers requested. Whereas competitors were held back by their cumbersome code and slow cadence of releasing features.

You'd be surprised how many businesses are run by completely incompetent people and still manage to survive.

A relative of mine who was an accountant for a small manufacturing plant and the systematic problems from top to bottom were shocking. They worked there for well over a decade and also managed a lot of other business aspects. Nothing got shipped, billed, ordered, or paid without them knowing. The company always had just enough income to keep going. Somehow, it was sustainable without any hidden external sources of money.

The problem is that anyone with a semblance of professional pride will find it mentally quite difficult to knowingly ship bad software.

Like, sure, even if we make best efforts to catch both obvious and less obvious bugs, all software we ship will still be full of bugs. But knowingly shipping software full of obvious bugs... it feels unprofessional. And makes you really feel the weight of all the inevitable bug reports that come in.

The alternative often becomes to warn about it, have the organization respond (whether explicitly or otherwise) "we don't care", and then, to preserve your sanity, say to yourself "well, then all bets are off, and I'm not responsible" which also isn't healthy, because it leaves you jaded, disengaged and robs you of your sense of professionalism.

I don't have a solution here lol other than find an org that cares about quality to an acceptable degree.

Ultimately it all comes down to business case. If there isn't one to invest in CI, developer time to build a test suite with 100% coverage, and then ongoing upkeep of that, then it's not going to happen.

We are too often religious about these things, and may not have visibility within the business to see why there isn't a case for it.

Having said that it can also be very hard to convince management of the business case. That may have had a bad experience of these tool and practices before and see them as a waste. Thay may also, in that specific case, be right.