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Survey Results

How prepared are you at product launch (or major release) time?

Survey period: 7 Nov 2022 to 14 Nov 2022

Time for some brutal honesty here.

OptionVotes% 
Usually everything's well tested, documented, marketing and sales are up to date, and we're ready for any issues6911.75
Most things are under control, but there are the occasional last minute panics23339.69
Generally it's a bit messy. Not everything's fully finished and we're applying duct tape as we roll out of the shop.8915.16
Debacle. Known bugs, missing features, and important functionality simply not complete.183.07
Panic stations. It's never ready. It's never close to being properly ready.61.02
We often don't even have a product at launch time. Just marketing and a fast-talking product manager.40.68
We don't do product launches. It's always incremental11319.25
We don't work on anything that gets 'released' to consumers or organisations.559.37



 
GeneralCustomers are tolerant Pin
trønderen8-Nov-22 7:25
trønderen8-Nov-22 7:25 
In my student days, we read a report on the bug count in OS360 over almost 40 releases. (I believe this is/was a well-known study, referenced in a lot of software engineering texts.) We were shocked to learn that in every release, there were from 1000 known bugs and upwards. It was far from perfect! Yet, customers trusted IBM; a thousand known bugs did not make them flee to other machines or OSes.

Entering working life, I learned that customer tolerance is the norm. As long as there is a workaround, users will do almost anything you tell them to. They learn to work around the issues. They are not academics - they don't want perfection, they want to have their job done, their problem solved.

That actually caused a problem for us: We had to hire interns on short time contracts to do testing at the UI level. We repeatedly saw their performance dropping after a few months: Then they had learned to intuitively avoid operations making the application lock up or the system to crash. They reported everything OK, because they used the application the appropriate way, not the way that crashed it Smile | :)

When I switched jobs to a Unix / emacs development environment, of course I was told that this software was just perfectly stable; it would never crash. Within a week, I was the infamous software killer, repeatedly going to one of The Great Gurus, showing that if I do so and so and so, emacs locks up, or my workstation crashes. They typically recoiled in horror: But what the elephant made you ever think of doing such a crazy thing? Everybody should understand why that locks up the machine! - Their own instincts had for years avoided those (undisputable) bugs in the software.

I never believe in anyone who claims to have tied up all loose ends, corrected all known bugs, or if not corrected, it is described in the 'Known Issues' document. There will always be loose ends, bugs that will be revealed the day after release, and your documentation of known issues turns out to be highly incomplete.

But calm down. Don't panic. The users will be friendly and willing to do tricks to have their problems solved.

Looking in the mirror: My MSWord 2013 is almost ten years old. Over those ten years, I have learnt at least a dozen different things that doesn't work; I have to do tricks. But I know the tricks; I use them all the time. Maybe they are fixed in a more recent version. Do I bother to update? No. There is of course the economic side, but more important: In ten years, I guess that the number of small and big UI changes is so large that my writing would slow down for months until I had the new UI under my skin. I can live with being a tolerant customer of MSWord 2013 Smile | :)
GeneralRe: Customers are tolerant Pin
Laiju k9-Nov-22 20:01
professionalLaiju k9-Nov-22 20:01 
GeneralDevelopers are not involved in deployment Pin
PIEBALDconsult8-Nov-22 6:46
mvePIEBALDconsult8-Nov-22 6:46 
Generalway WAY back in the Day Pin
MarkTJohnson8-Nov-22 2:58
professionalMarkTJohnson8-Nov-22 2:58 
GeneralRe: way WAY back in the Day Pin
Juan Pablo Reyes Altamirano8-Nov-22 5:17
Juan Pablo Reyes Altamirano8-Nov-22 5:17 
General99% of the time - no worries Pin
Slacker0078-Nov-22 2:37
professionalSlacker0078-Nov-22 2:37 
GeneralSo i am the only one... Pin
CPallini8-Nov-22 2:02
mveCPallini8-Nov-22 2:02 
GeneralI had to dig deep to find this message (product rollout from 2015) Pin
kmoorevs7-Nov-22 4:21
kmoorevs7-Nov-22 4:21 
GeneralDiminishing returns Pin
lucanor7-Nov-22 3:49
lucanor7-Nov-22 3:49 
GeneralBefore better than now Pin
Nelek6-Nov-22 23:08
protectorNelek6-Nov-22 23:08 
GeneralI can proudly say, I'm very well prepared Pin
Sander Rossel6-Nov-22 22:04
professionalSander Rossel6-Nov-22 22:04 
GeneralI always worked in safety relevant fields Pin
den2k886-Nov-22 22:02
professionalden2k886-Nov-22 22:02 
GeneralI try, I really do ... Pin
OriginalGriff6-Nov-22 20:21
mveOriginalGriff6-Nov-22 20:21 

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