ZeroMQ

On Up-Front Testing

Being able to fully test the real behavior of individual components in the laboratory can make a 10x or 100x difference to the cost of your project. That confirmation bias engineers have to their own work makes up-front testing incredibly profitable, and late-stage testing incredibly expensive.

I’ll tell you a short story about a project we worked on in the late 1990s. We provided the software, and other teams the hardware, for a factory automation project. Three or four teams brought their experts on-site, which was a remote factory (funny how the polluting factories are always in a remote border country).

One of these teams, a firm specializing in industrial automation, built ticket machines: kiosks, and software to run on them. Nothing unusual: swipe a badge, choose an option, receive a ticket. They assembled two of these kiosks on-site, each week bringing some more bits and pieces. Ticket printers, monitor screens, special keypads from Israel. The stuff had to be resistant against dust since the kiosks sat outside. Nothing worked. The screens were unreadable in the sun. The ticket printers continually jammed and misprinted. The internals of the kiosk were just sat on wooden shelving. The kiosk software crashed regularly. It was comedic, except that the project really, really had to work, so we spent weeks—months—on-site helping the other teams debug their bits and pieces until it worked.

A year later, a second factory, and the same story. By this time ...