About the Keystone Cops, The Cart and The Horse:

The vast majority of the software projects that I have seen, in one way or another, always made me think of the Keystone Cops (the early 20 century comedians) trying to compete in F1 with a car with square tires.

It doesn’t matter how hard the Keystone’s try to push, or how many of them are pushing, the car will not run at all or fast.

If the tires were round, the requirement of Keystones will be less and there will be a chance of winning the race.

Now let’s go back to software. What happened during the last 20 odd years?

People trying to reach first mover advantage set up companies that could not maintain that advantage. In other words they set up themselves for failure in the future: near, medium, or long.

Everything needed to be fast: quality? Effieciency? Next release. But once the ball got rolling, who was the one to improve the process when there were two more deadlines in the coming months?

So the sound marketing principle of “It is cheaper to keep an existing customer happy than acquiring a new one” went down the drain by consistently having quality problems.

The MS case is interesting because they are the ones who tried to use the 1:1 ratio or something close to it. But these inefficiency problems are everywhere.

I guess this event it is going to put a new twist in to outsourcing. Why look for cheaper labor, in the hope to increase the head-count, if increasing the head count does not solve the problem?

I do not have anything against outsourcing. But does it make sense to outsource a flawed process? Do we need more people or a more rational use of all the resources at hand?

The economic impact of delayed schedules and bad quality software (lost sales and extra expenses) should be measured not only for MS but for the whole industry. I guess the figure would be mind-boggling.

On to other things: I just found a beta version of VS .Net 2005 (a year to use after installing) Hopefully it would work still, so I can go back to our .Net engine or Amber.

I was just checking the new Junit release (4.0) It’s looking like Nunit but in Java.

But the same flaws remain in both: why would a user care about anything else but the input and the output of a test? Why expend so many resources executing the inner workings of these two when so much logic under test remains unexecuted in gthe overall process?