Author says we have a right to expect well-made
software
Originally published in: Business in
Vancouver,
Issue #513, July 24, 2001 The high-tech office column
by ALAN ZISMAN
Author says we have a right to expect well-made
software
Can you honestly say you're happy with the
software you're using?
Despite the promises of software companies, and often glowing reviews
from
the media, most of us would admit to sometimes feeling software has not
made our work any easier.
In his 2000 book The Software Conspiracy
(McGraw Hill), long-time
technology writer Mark Minasi goes further. Minasi suggests
that
we should stop making excuses for computer problems. Rather than cutely
referring to software "bugs," he would prefer we use the term
"defects,"
and says we put up with design defects in software that we wouldn't
tolerate
in toasters -- let alone something more important, like an automobile.
He points out that in 1996, North American employees
spent more than
65-million hours on hold waiting for software tech support. That
doesn't
count the time lost or economic cost of having to re-enter all your
data
after the software crashes.
While defects in word processors have never killed
anyone, buggy software
in the Patriot missile guidance system led to the death of 28 U.S.
military
personnel in the Gulf War. Defective software in the Therac-25 X-ray
machine
killed several patients and General Motors was forced to pay
US$7.5
million in punitive damages after known bugs in the fuel injection
software
for its Chevrolet 2500 pickup led to the death of seven-year-old Bart
Johnson.
While the industry claims that it's impossible to
produce bug-free software,
Minasi points out that "'Can't be perfect' is different from 'No
quality
control is necessary.'" Software designed for large mainframe systems
is
designed to a much higher standard than the shrink-wrapped products
aimed
at home and office personal computers. Software for NASA
spacecraft
is designed with multiple modules checking one another's results. This
redundancy minimizes errors.
Carnegie Mellon University has been promoting
its Capability
Maturity Model (CMM) for producing higher-quality software since 1987,
which it claims results in dramatic reductions in software defect
rates.
The software industry is a profitable one. And the
US$20 billion it
pumps into the U.S. economy every year just about balances what
Americans
spend to buy foreign cars.
Software vendors, however, claim that customers are
more interested
in features than in bugs and that taking the time and effort necessary
to improve quality would boost prices while slowing down the software
development
cycle. They imply that if a vendor took the time to produce a
higher-quality
product, the competition would be able to beat them to market with
cheaper,
more feature-laden products.
Minasi argues that software consumers haven't been
given a choice; rather
than being offered free bug-fixes for their existing software, vendors
prefer to have customers pay to upgrade to a new version, with new
features
and a new set of bugs.
In the 1970s North American buyers started opting in
large numbers for
import cars, offering better reliability and gas mileage instead of
ever-fancier
features. The relatively low rate of upgrade to the latest office suite
packages and increasing interest in robust operating systems such as
Linux
suggest that the software industry may be seeing the beginnings of a
similar
consumer revolt.
Minasi doesn't expect things to change overnight,
however. In the meantime,
he suggests fed-up software consumers should let vendors know how they
feel and offers steps for defense against defective software that is
all
too likely to crash, taking down a day's work with it.
As an aside: A few weeks ago, we noted that Microsoft
was giving corporate
customers until the end of October for low-cost upgrades to its Office
XP suite. The deadline has now been extended by six months, giving
business
users until February 28, 2002, to sign onto the company's new Software
Assurance plan.