From Fefe’s Internet Security Days keynote:
Schlechte Software zu verbreiten ist unmoralisch.
Translation: Spreading sloppy software is immoral. It’s like producing waste and dumping it into a river. Properly handling would be expensive, illegal dumping saves money and turns it into a SEP.
Writing sloppy software is similar. Instead of investing time into doing it right, you try to externalize costs: The client will somehow (have to) deal with it. They either have to pay you to make it better the second time or they have to spend time and nerves every day to work around shortcomings.
When we see someone dump toxic waste in a forest, most people are outraged. The same people, when they are managers of a software company, sign contracts that define the delivery date of something before knowing the requirements. Software developers, desperately trying to feel and look competent, shout “Done!” only to collapse into a morose heap of self-pity after a minimum of poking what this “done” really means.
Fefe is arguing that doing it right is as expensive as doing it sloppily. I have the same hunch. I’ve seen numbers on the Standish Group Chaos Report (alt: Wikipedia, German) which gives a good indication how much failing projects cost: Around 20% are a total waste of money since they are eventually killed, 52% cost twice as much, only 30% make it in time, in budget and with the promised feature set (note: I bet at least half of those 30% made it because the feature set was reduced/readjusted during the project).
If you assume that in 2014, $250 billion was spent on software development in the US, that means cost of $50 billion on failed projects alone. That is our money. Your’s and mine. Companies don’t magically get money, they sell products and each wasted project eventually means additional figures on some price tag in a shop.
Then we have $125 billion which should have been $62 billion but another $62 billion was necessary to make it to the finishing line. It’s a harder to tell how much of that is wasted. You can’t count projects that were simply underestimated or feature creep – additional features cost additional money, so it’s out of budget but not wasted. Let’s assume $10 billion (less than 10% waste overall) in this group.
In a perfect world, that would mean we could spend 24% ($60 billion out of $250) more on software quality without any additional cost.
Related articles:
Posted by digulla 
Dark Views 