I work in the hectic world of software maintenance. When there is a high priority problem, there is pressure to cut corners to quickly ship out a fix. This works great when there are no problems. But we get in trouble when this leads to even more problems. And you know that is bound to happen.
The same goes for new features we implement in our legacy system. It seems no matter how many new managers we get, there is still always a rush to implement new features and deliver. Then things get tough and developers take short cuts to ship on time. The result is some seriously buggy code. More often it is code that does not meet customer expectations.
It is time to pay more than lip serve to software quality. You need to make a large initial investment and take the hard line on this. In the end you will benefit. At least that is my premise. The question is how do you implement quality improvement when there is the insane desire to ship software fast? This is the question I want to answer in the upcoming posts of this blog.
