Regardless of the legal implications, software developers/vendoers DO get charged financially for
the mis-behavior of their software. The charge comes in the form of support costs which in many
organizations exceed development costs.
In my organization, that fact has had a huge impact on the way we do business. As is often stated,
and our experience supports, the biggest source of bugs/support problems is bad design or bad requirements.
Often, those bad requirements have to do with what platforms/other software our products need to support.
Coding errors are relatively few, far between, tend to get caught early in the development process, and are
cheap to fix. Furthermore, brutal experience has shown that we're much better off delaying a new feature
than releasing a buggy version.
In this environment, going off without a reviewed spec, including a test plan, and plunging into the coding will result in the programmer being
offered an opportunity to gain further experience at a different company. They might even be able to take their manager
with them!
Ruven
| "Jacques Carette" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent by: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 03/08/2005 02:07 PM
|
To: [email protected] cc: Subject: RE: PPIG discuss: Competence (was: About natural naming) |
> Want to improve the quality of software engineers? Start putting
> a few of them in jail. That is get the attention of those in the field.
I agree that software vendors / developers ought to be liable for the
mis-behaviour of their software, the exact same way that hardware vendors
are. Already the threat of lawsuits and fines might be sufficient to get a
lot of people's attention, *especially* the behemoths.
Now *that* would have quite an effect on the 'psychology of programming' !
Jacques
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