4 ms·
The key is what is the right question: The right question is not wether it's more expensive to fix bugs in production or earlier. The key question is: Who bea
by loopz 5y ago
The key is what is the right question:
The right question is not wether it's more expensive to fix bugs in production or earlier. The key question is:
Who bears the brunt of the cost of fixing bugs at one stage and another?
This is a parallell to Conway's law: Which cost-center benefits for NOT working with agility (not rituals) and using Dev(Sec)Ops (collaboration) to improve processes and techniques?
It's that simple. Anything else will not get oxygen to thrive, simply because of no allocated priority and funds to bridge the disconnect.
What to call this law?
Maybe "The Law of Cost Centers", or something similar.
Anyone trying to fix this flaw will be fighting windmills head-on every step of the way. The big international corporations will have budgeted this due to scale and a must-have need, to be much more available and reliable than smaller shops.
- manmal 5y agoIndeed. Many custom software vendors justify their high maintenance fee (in part) with "ongoing bugfixes and improvements". What would be their incentive to write higher quality software, once they've signed the deal?
- loopz 5y agoThis is the classical squeeze of the employees, between management and vendors, neither of which have incentives for improvements of software due to costs. So it is in many cases up to each customer to discover all bugs, and often even specify(!) technical solutions to a vendor that maybe even forgotten the domain, mix and misplaces their branches (yay, new bugs!) and require handholding and escalations to get through to. In management's eyes, this is of course all problems with employee laziness: That employees aren't fighting enough of their windmills. Documentations of testresults and bug statistics go to /dev/null. If you're really unlucky, you are expected to lobby for others' targets, but not your own. Good times.
- satyrnein 5y agoIt seems like there's something interesting here but I'm having trouble getting from the questions to the actual answer. Could you please state directly, what is the (proposed) "Law of Cost Centers"? Sorry if I'm being dense!
- loopz 5y agoLaw of Cost Centers: The output of complex organisation will, given time, become delineated arbitrarily between cost centers. Attempts to meet in the middle will have to deal with asymptotic costs, inevitably overshooting diminishing gains from combining efforts. In other words, with cost centers present, the whole becomes less valuable than its parts. Or stated another way: Some parts will, in presence of cost centers, inevitably take precedence from the whole, as well as other parts.