I am going down this path to make a point. The common argument I see is that NASA produces reliable software and it costs millions of dollars. Who could afford that level of reliability other than an agency with deep tax pockets? The common computer user certainly couldn't. But what this argument misses is that NASA is pretty much their only customer. By the same logic, if a car can only be made reliable by investing millions of dollars in research and development, then a company that builds just a single car (as in one physical car, not one model) would have to charge millions for it just to break even. By this argument which is commonly given to justify sloppy software, nobody but the most wealthy could afford a reliable car. But that is not the case because this is not what car manufacturers do. They invest millions in making a reliable design, that is true. But then they reproduce that design at a minute fraction of the original cost. That design, reproduced tens of thousands of times, is then shipped to dealers who can afford to charge $25K for that same car that took millions to design and produce and still make enough commission to take a week long vacation to the Bahamas. In other words, the cost of producing a reliable car CAN be compared to the cost of producing reliable software if both have a large customer base. It is a valid comparison.
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The problems I have seen seem to come in with custom development projects. They usually fall in the category of "one customer who must bear all of the cost". These projects lack the economy of scale that mass produced products enjoy and are like NASA and FAA projects in this respect. One client must bear the full cost and the argument can be made that, faced with the enormous cost of producing extremely high quality software, most companies settle for "good enough" software for a much lower cost. There is a lot of truth in this argument and I believe it is valid. But the flaw here is the assumption that the only way to produce quality software is by dramatically increasing cost. The implication is that clients put up with sloppy work because they can't afford high quality work. What this ignores is that there are many ways of controlling both cost and quality. In my next article, I will talk about some of the main causes of high cost and poor quality on software projects. See you then.
