Are software companies knowingly releasing buggy, defect-ridden software intentionally? In the words of Sarah Palin, “You betcha!” I’m not saying that they release bad software with malice. It’s more about the cost equation associated with fixing the defects. I was talking with Tom Poppendieck at the ADP Conference last week and here’s how he explains the costs associated with fixing defects:

• Fix it now: The effort to fix a defect as soon as your developer types the wrong code is pressing Ctrl-Z (UNDO!). Cost is essentially ZERO. And if you’re pair programming, you’re very likely to catch the defect at this point.
• We’ll fix it next week: The cost of fixing a defect one week after it happens is a fix on the incorrect code, plus the time refactoring one week of code developed on top of the bad code. Probably not too much, we’re talking about a few hours max.
• We’ll fix it at the end of our iteration: The cost of fixing the defect after a two-week iteration is probably about twice as much as after one week. Cost is up to one day.
• Don’t worry, we’ll get to it later, we don’t have enough QA budget for it now: Here we are 6 months later at the release date. The cost of fixing one error in the code is now exponential if you have to refactor 6 months of code based on the initial defect. Cost: Potentially HUGE!

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Wow, Monday was quite the rollercoaster ride for EdgeHopper.com. Apparently, someone named GST on Reddit.com submitted my post “What Toyota knows that GM doesn’t” to his Reddit list at around 7:45 in the morning (Thanks GST). By 9:00 am., I was getting emails and Tweets that my site was down. Apparently, I was exceeding my CPU quota:

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T. Boone Pickens has an awesome four-minute presentation about his plan to save America’s energy future. Great topic. Great ideas. Great presentation. It’s the perfect combination of whiteboard simplicity mixed with some really connected and compelling graphics.

Boone’s message: “America is in a hole and it’s getting deeper every day. We import 70 percent of our oil at a cost of several hundred billion a year. I’ve been an oil man all my life, but this is one emergency we can’t drill our way out of. But if we create a new renewable energy network, we can break our addiction to foreign oil. On January 20, 2009, a new President gets sworn in. If we’re organized, we can convince Congress to make major changes toward cleaner, cheaper and domestic energy resources.To get this done, I need your help. Check out the plan. If you think it’s worth fighting for, please join our effort, and encourage everyone you know to do the same.”

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Do you know how many hourly jobs GM has laid off from 2006 to July 2008? Take a guess. How about 34,000? And now, they’re talking about another 5,500 layoffs. And now they’re asking you and your government for a bailout to end their troubled, outdated, low quality, wasteful production system. But, let’s not focus on fixing GM’s problems with an infusion of cash. There’s something even deeper going on here that’s really wrong.

OK, here’s a better question. How many hourly jobs has Toyota’s American production system laid off in the same time frame? Zero. That’s right. ZERO. How? Isn’t Toyota experiencing the same slow down in auto sales as GM is? Yes, it is. And yes, Toyota has halted production at its Texas and Indiana plants for the past 3 months. But the 4,500 people who work at those plants have not been laid off. What!?!?! How? Why?

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