March 29, 2010
Ergo, I propose the Golden Rules for Deciding When Your Software Is Ready for Prime Time. The Golden Rules state that you should keep testing your software and fixing bugs until the new bugs you find:
Aren’t embarrassing to your company.
Won’t tick off your customers.
The cost of fixing all the bugs in your program and then being sure you fixed them all is way too high compared to the cost of having a few users hit some bugs they won’t care about. The mindset here is not to use your customers as your testers — you’re bound to violate the golden rules if you do that — but rather to recognize that not all bugs are created equal, and some bugs justify not shipping a product while others don’t. Don’t be afraid to ship software with bugs. If you’ve got a good product that people want, a couple bugs won’t bother them at all, especially if updates to your product are easy to deploy, as they are with SaaS or a web application.
(Link: The Economics of Perfect Software)
