Ron,
>a) At the programmer level, a great many psychological processes
> actually conspire against quality.
I disagree. I think people are good at optimizing the resources available
to them to do the job at hand. You might like to read
"Simple heuristics that make us smart" by Gigerenzer, Todd, et al.
A Cheesey title, but written by a group of people who have been doing some
very interesting studies. These studies have looked at how people answer
questions that they don't know the answer to. That is, what heuristics do
they use to deduce an answer. A lot like programming.
You also have to be careful not to use quality in too narrow a sense.
It's engineering definition is "fitness for purpose". A shoddy product
may have quality if it solves the problem it was designed to solve.
> For example, most programmers
> are still unaware of the Myers curve, and therefore allocate their
> testing efforts inappropriately. Another: the psychological tendency to
>overestimate
> conjunctive events makes us underestimate the need for testing
> ("My code is 90% failure free, your code is 90% failure free, and Sam's
> code is 90% failure free -- this project must be in pretty good shape!"
> No, actually the math says that this project has less than a 75% chance
> of not producing failures). That's just two of an array of psychological
> forces conspiring against quality in the very act of programming.
These are not psychological forces, they are just plain ignorance.
Knowledge is a resource. People who don't have it cannot use it.
derek
--
Derek M Jones tel: +44 (0) 1252 520 667
Knowledge Software Ltd mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Applications Standards Conformance Testing http://www.knosof.co.uk
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