Real-Politik plus 150

Reading The Economist's article about MS and the beating that its stock price took, I couldn't stop thinking about the realpolitik that should be going on inside.

Traditionally, within an organization, groups become important and gain budgetary weight if their size increases. It is a matter of visibility.

This is important because the leader of that group, say the VP of engineering in a software company, will get stock options or bonuses depending on that visibility.

People are rewarded by the responsibility and visibility they seem to have, not by the improvements in their groups. So, for a Director of Quality Assurance of Acme Software, having lots of people is the way up.

And for this Director, becoming more efficient by testing more with less people is not a particularly enticing proposition. Especially if the credit for that improvement goes to someone else.

If on top of that there is a chance that in the past, some releases were less than acceptable and the CTO or VP needs to do some cyb'ing, what we have is the makings of a royal mess: The VP/CTO trying to cover her/his back, the Director of QA protecting the turf, and a product's quality going down hill.

It woudn't surprise me that something like that is going on inside MS.

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Well, we have reached 150 downloads of the white paper.

This number is more than we expected, and we appreciate the feedback we've gotten.

We would love to see more feedback. Please feel free to email me directly with anything, we mean anything, you have to say about the paper.

http://efekctive.com/blogging/wp/quality_advantage_V2.pdf