I have found a bug! So what?

Posted on May 24, 2005

The equilibrium between bugs, satisfied customers and the margin.

One year ago I’ve decided to trade my Renault for a new car, (no names here, just an indication that it is a low end brand). Why I did it? Because my Renault started to break apart (bad parts quality) and I thought that going for a new car even a low end car would save my stress levels for at least 2 years.

Well, I soon discovered that my new car was defective from the factory and I’ve spent half an year trying to fix it at the dealers as nobody knew what was happening. As a results, I’ve started to find out a lot of “bugs” for that car: the tyres don’t perform well in wet roads; the shock absorbers are a little too hard for our roads; the automatic radio antennae was doing a horrible noise. And as you can imagine, for each of the above issues I was very angry and keep on calling and visiting the dealers.

Now, the software industry. When is the last time you have discovered a bug? I bet it was 5 minutes ago. Just an hour ago, I’ve discovered that Mozzila has a nasty behavior when trying to attach e-mails that already have other attachment. It simply takes out all the attachments from the initial smaller e-mail and adds them to the new email. And simply you can’t find out what attachments belong to the initial email and which ones to the big email. So what do you do? Nothing! Because your opinion simply doesn’t count.

Are you a web developer or a team manager? Well, is not important to have a bug free product, but to have a level of bugs that still sell your product and gives you a good margin. Try this with a car, and you would be killed by angry customers!

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Comments

One Response to “I have found a bug! So what?”

  1. Chris Charlton [Visitor] on May 25th, 2005 5:55 pm

    Our bugs don’t veer off the road. Ouch.

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