13 ms·

I would argue that the decline in software quality is related to the rise of SaaS coupled with Product Manager-driven development. If a product is generating co

I would argue that the decline in software quality is related to the rise of SaaS coupled with Product Manager-driven development. If a product is generating consistent revenue, resources are devoted to expanding that revenue. It's extraordinarily difficult to justify bugfixes and incremental improvements using exclusively analytics data, so organizations are generally not incentivized to reward that kind of activity.

westoncb 4y ago
> It's extraordinarily difficult to justify bugfixes and incremental improvements using exclusively analytics data Why would analytics be any less capable of conveying how these attributes of a software product affect customer purchasing decisions? If the metrics relate to e.g. retention, new users etc., these are independent of which aspects of the software cause them. A correlation is a correlation. Unless there is some reason to think product managers would be especially unaware of quality as a variable to observe.
majormajor 4y ago
Do you think there's no such thing as a number of bugs that would cause customers to leave more rapidly? I don't see a big difference between what you're saying and the person you're responding to: until the level of bugs reaches the point where it hits revenue, it doesn't make sense to invest in fixing them. There's a tolerance for some level of imperfection - in fact, expecting perfection is itself somewhat irrational here since it's not like other industries routinely deeliver perfection. I'm also not convinced we're seeing an overall decline in software quality. There was a LOT of shit software from the 80s and 90s I don't want to go back to. EDIT: It's a bit of a Yogi Berra - "modern software is terrible, people just shovel out crap since the customers don't want to wait!"

13 ms·

I would argue that the decline in software quality is related to the rise of SaaS coupled with Product Manager-driven development. If a product is generating co

by swivelmaster 4y ago

westoncb 4y ago
> It's extraordinarily difficult to justify bugfixes and incremental improvements using exclusively analytics data Why would analytics be any less capable of conveying how these attributes of a software product affect customer purchasing decisions? If the metrics relate to e.g. retention, new users etc., these are independent of which aspects of the software cause them. A correlation is a correlation. Unless there is some reason to think product managers would be especially unaware of quality as a variable to observe.
majormajor 4y ago
Do you think there's no such thing as a number of bugs that would cause customers to leave more rapidly? I don't see a big difference between what you're saying and the person you're responding to: until the level of bugs reaches the point where it hits revenue, it doesn't make sense to invest in fixing them. There's a tolerance for some level of imperfection - in fact, expecting perfection is itself somewhat irrational here since it's not like other industries routinely deeliver perfection. I'm also not convinced we're seeing an overall decline in software quality. There was a LOT of shit software from the 80s and 90s I don't want to go back to. EDIT: It's a bit of a Yogi Berra - "modern software is terrible, people just shovel out crap since the customers don't want to wait!"