Software Stinks!

Software Stinks!


Remember that day when you are in a critical phase of delivery, No I didn’t mean delivering a baby. Something more critical, delivering the software. When everything goes as planned in the progress bar suddenly the dialog says memory reference error and the application crashes. I can only pity the guy who sees that! This last minute fiasco is relevant to most of the things that is done in life. But the agony here is that this fiasco is not handled with right balance. Instead the team or individual toils with a strange pessimism striking his keyboard hard and clicking his mouse left to right!

Many of us plan for success but don’t plan well to handle failures when faced unexpectedly. When the graph drools to the nadir we don’t want to plan to see it improving slowly but want it to sky rocket. Many a times we don’t want to explain the customer and take him to confidence but try to keep on to the dates and release the product full of defect. That’s when the customer looses confidence upon us and starts suspecting our capability.

Sam Walton said “There is only one boss-the customer. And he can fire everyone-from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else”

It is equally important that we predict our risks as we predict our strengths, to the customer. It’s important that he believes in us as a company more than as a service provider. Credibility is the key, delivery isn’t. When we fail to realize the nuances in the abstract level we end up losing the credibility and the customer forever.

Errors are acceptable but failure is not. When spotted as errors we should look at it with magnifying lens and try solving it. Otherwise the infinite pointers will just make us paranoid towards the end.

Disaster management becomes the key and demands a lot of maturity in handling. Blame game will just add to the commotion and derail association. It’s very important we Count the chickens before the hatch. This can make us breathe easy and keep us prepared for some risks upcoming.

It’s very much in our hands to prevent that Software from stinking!!.