The Next Leap in Productivity: What Top Managers Really Need to Know about Information Technology

1.8. Productivity Trumps Quality—and for Good Reason!

In old-fashioned software shops—of which there are hundreds of thousands in existence today—the function of the "Quality" group is testing software to find bugs.

If automobile plants worked this way, the quality group would drive each car for 10,000 miles after it came off the assembly line to make sure nothing was broken. Sounds pretty silly, doesn't it?

The right thing to do is to make sure the right processes are in place to guarantee that each car coming off the line is perfect. The attention is to the process, not to the product.

That is the approach I take in developing software tools. While I do make software that finds bugs, the general purpose of all my tools is preventing bugs from ever being created in the first place!

For example, in lots of places, developers like to work with prototypes that they know are buggy, just to get a feel for the problem. That is dangerous, and my tools do not allow it. Software developers use my software to check their software for bugs before it can be put anywhere where it can do damage, even in early prototype versions.

Here is another way of saying it: People use my software to make sure that the software they create actually works—before it is loaded into a router, a network server, or a mobile phone.

My software is a critical piece of their quality management process. In many instances, my software has enabled companies to leap ahead of their competitors.