Quality Disasters

In 1940 Tacoma Narrow Bridge felt down because of poor design. A that time bridge's design did not include aerodynamics studies. After this problem more accurated mathematical verifications have been included designig bridges.




In 1997 Mercedes Class A became world wide famous because it failed the moose test. Mercedes had to fix the "bug" by adding ESP. This made Class A one of the safest cars in its category and forced Mercedes to recall all the units sold.

These two are very famous examples of poor design. Both of them turned into money lost. It is easy to understand why.

Few years before the Mercedes Class A problem, in 1993, started one of the worst IT disaster ever: the Foxmeyer Delta III project. I am not analyzing here the project nor the causes of such a disaster. What I want to underline here is that a failure in IT, even in a manufacturing company like Foxmeyer, can lead to serious consequences: FoxMeyer went bankrupt. Today if you google for foxmeyer you find only "lawsuite" related articles and the "tale" of the disaster.

A failure in an IT project can turn out in a catastropher for the entire company. IT applications today are the business. If you want to put it other way round: the business today is strongly "supported" by IT Applications. This means that extra quality effort is justified even from the business point of view.

It is generally agreed that Analysis should account for 30% of the budget, Coding and Development for 40 and Quality and Deployment for the remaining 30%. I always challenge IT managers to split the budget: 70% to a System Integrator in charge of analyze, design and develop the application and 30% to a System Integrator in charge of doing quality, and by quality I mean all those activities with the aim to assure that the application complies with the business's requirements.

The problem here is that most of IT managers prefer to choose a single system integrator to build their application. This probably is a cost saving choice but it could seriously harm quality.