Archive for November 30th, 2008

Posted on November 30, 2008 - by jono

Money. Stability?

Something struck me yesterday, while Firefox 3 was throwing a hissy fit. Is there some kind of correlation between the amount of money invested in a project or product and instability? I know this sounds like a bit of a negative question, and I don’t mean to rag on the Firefox folks, but it seems that as more money has been pouring into Mozilla Towers, the quality has been compromised. At first I thought this was just on Linux, but it seems to be on Windows too.

This is by no means an issue specific to Mozilla though – look at Microsoft with Vista. They filled the worlds largest boot full of money and poured it into the Vista machine and…bang! Instability. The more I think about it, the more examples occur to me.

Is it money directly? Or is it really that more money means more staff employed and instead the quality failure is due to management and coordination problems? Maybe it is more users that causes the problems – more users means more needs and requirements which maybe cloud the QA process? Alternatively, do the quality problems really exist, or are our expectations higher than they were? Do we expect more of our two examples, Firefox and Vista, than we did many moons ago?

I would love to hear your thoughts and experiences on this folks. I wonder what hints we can uncover.