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From: aland@servio.slc.com (Alan Darlington)
Subject: Re: Yourdan's recent article on SM
Message-ID: <1996Apr19.175400.8024@gemstone.com>
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References: <guycoleDpzBGn.3sr@netcom.com> <4l36cn$1eru@watnews1.watson.ibm.com> <4l4khv$4oo@news1.panix.com>
Date: Fri, 19 Apr 1996 17:54:00 GMT
Lines: 42

dsiegel@panix.com (David M. Siegel) writes:
> David N. Smith <dnsmith@watson.ibm.com> wrote:
> 
> >Oh, yes, he has a new great thing that is one of the saviors of the
> >American Programmer. It's detailedin a chapter I've not read, but it was
> >previewed in one I have:
> 
> >   Good-enough Programming
> 
> >That is producing programs with bugs, but not really bad ones. Programs
> >that work Good Enough to use. It's going to save us. FOrget quality. Just
> >be Good Enough...
> 
> If it's good enough for Microsoft...
> -dms
> 

Actually, it is good enough for just about anybody.  :-(   At
least, I'm not aware of any software companies selling products
with zero errors.  (The space shuttle software may be close,
but it doesn't have a very large market :-).

On the other hand, why should companies do this?  Customers are
_not_ willing to pay double or triple prices for quality software.
I remember reading that a number of software companies that won
TQM awards (or something like that - anyone know for sure?)
subsequently went bankrupt.  How many people here would pay
$20,000 for an error-free version of smalltalk???  (Maybe a few
large - or smart - companies, but my experience has been that
the cheapest product will most likely win.  I once recommended
ParcPlace over Digitalk, and...  :-(  )

While I'm on the band-wagon, the same thing applies to feature
bloat (also known here as image bloat  :-).  Lots of people
complain about it, but any company actually trying to do some-
thing about it would quickly go broke (IMHO).

  Sigh...
  Alan
    (standard disclaimer)


