>My point is that there is another customer, one that is too often ignored >by everyone in the organization - the Stockholder.
From a quality point of view, I find just the opposite to be true. Far too
much emphasis placed on stockholder concerns. This is in evidence by Wall
Streets recent 'disappointment' with HPs' 'lackluster' performance
resulting in a hiring freeze when we were already short staffed. Quality
took a back seat to profit margin.
Also:
>The project is reported to be 90% completed, then seems to hang at 90% for >as much as a year or more. Dynamics models usually show that the "lost >year" is tied to continuing to a) discover work that was not specified or >considered in sizing, and b) to ongoing discovery of rework (which can >equal as much as the full project estimation!). If something is not done >about the quality issue, fewer and fewer developers are able to work on >"new", and instead must constantly focus on fixing bugs, adding >enhancements (frequently, features that were dropped to get the product >out the door). A separate feedback loop results from the developers >inability to turn products over to a separate support group. The >interrupt-driven nature of support is antithetical to the social stream of >consciousness nature of software team development.
>Further, turn-over is likely to increase as developers remain responsible >for supporting more and more legacy (in some cases, we estimated as much >as 80% of a developer was actually spent in customer support).
We are the textbook case of this example. I think, however, that this
business philosophy is wholly driven by stockholder expectations. The
quicker that you can get the product to market means more sales and higher
returns. I have lost count of the number of times that the product manager
has blown off a system bug with the phrase "the customer never uses that
feature anyway". Then the less time that the developer has to spend fixing
the bug, the more they can spend developing new products with the intention
of taking a greater market share.