Thursday, August 21, 2008

Improving software quality

I had missed this previously but Glenn reported from the ESRI conference that the "#1 time saver" in ArcGIS 9.3 is the ability to report product bugs more efficiently :O. Don't get me wrong, all products have bugs, I'm all for being able to report them easily, and this is a useful feature. And I'm sure customers are pleased to hear about a focus on software quality. But to me it sends a pretty negative message to the marketplace about how much time your users spend entering bugs for any software company to present this as the top productivity improvement in a major new release - it seemed like a very odd way to present it to me!

However, ESRI has not gone as far as Microsoft in its dedication to improving software quality. A friend of mine recently drew my attention to the program highlighted in the video below, which I highly recommend watching. I am thinking of instituting a similar program at Spatial Networking :) !!

1 comment:

Aaron said...

That video was great! 8-) Just be careful where you sit next time you're in the office - don't want you to accidently take a developers chair...