My post of yesterday back referenced an attack on Sick Stigma which in turn prompted an excellent mini-case from John Schlesinger in the comments. I quote:
When I worked at IBM we were asked (in 1990) to 6Sigma our CICS development team. The gurus told us that the next release of CICS could only have 6 bugs (or APARs as we called them). This was ridiculous, but luckily a colleague ran a report and showed that IBM program products had extremely strong positive correlation of profitability with APAR rate. That is, the products with the most APARs were the most profitable. This is because great products, like CICS, get used for lots of things we didn't think of and for which we didn't test. Mediocre products only get used for what the tests cover. Bad products don't get used at all and so generate almost no bugs.
Now I think this makes a very important point. Innovation happens when people use things in unexpected ways, or come up against intractable problems. We learn from tolerated failure, without the world is sterile and dies. Systems that eliminate failure, eliminate innovation.
Comments (5)
Agree 100%. We develop very specialized products and when we are discussing our user base a common way to understand that a user is not engaged is to say "We never get trouble calls from them. They must not be using it."
Of course, trouble calls can be driven by user as well as product errors, but as products such as ours become more successful, they get pushed further and further out of their "design bandwidth" and hence generate more errors, more desire to "game the system", and more funding to make enhancements for things the products couldn't quite do the way the user wanted them done.
Having customers call is the sign of a healthy product and an involved user base. At least it is for our type of product.
Now, in the case of MS Vista .....
Posted by Wayne Zandbergen | June 9, 2008 1:44 PM
Posted on June 9, 2008 13:44
A nice linked post here
Posted by Dave Snowden![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/dave/nav-commenters.gif)
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June 9, 2008 2:42 PM
Posted on June 9, 2008 14:42
I just tried it on few of our products... It is true (and thinking about it, so obvious). This is great, I will use it in the next few release launches!!!!
Posted by Luca Letizia | June 9, 2008 5:24 PM
Posted on June 9, 2008 17:24
You probably don't hear this often, Dave but I'm going to accuse you hear of taking too limited a perspective :) althought it *is* a very nice turn of phrase. If I may, I will broaden your statement (although unfortunately less poetic) to:
"Systems that eliminate failure, move innovation to outside the system."
In other words, the users move to something else.
Posted by Keith Fortowsky | June 9, 2008 8:51 PM
Posted on June 9, 2008 20:51
Also this is a classic case where we need to distinguish between cause -> effect and contextual correlation, i.e. is not because there are bugs in the software that the software is successful...
Posted by Luca Letizia | June 10, 2008 10:17 AM
Posted on June 10, 2008 10:17