Wednesday, October 13, 2004
 
Good Software Takes Time

In a piece entitled "Good Software Takes Ten Years. Get Used To It", Joel Spolsky explains how good, robust software needs time:
    To experienced software people, none of this is very surprising. You write the first version of your product, a few people use it, they might like it, but there are too many obvious missing features, performance problems, whatever, so a year later, you've got version 2.0. Everybody argues about which features are going to go into 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, because there are so many important things to do. I remember from the Excel days how many things we had that we just had to do. Pivot Tables. 3-D spreadsheets. VBA. Data access. When you finally shipped a new version to the waiting public, people fell all over themselves to buy it. Remember Windows 3.1? And it positively, absolutely needed long file names, it needed memory protection, it needed plug and play, it needed a zillion important things that we can't imagine living without, but there was no time, so those features had to wait for Windows 95.
I would disagree with the first sentence though; to experienced people working in the software industry, this might come as a surprise, but to many people in the software industry, good software is software that goes out on schedule or satisfies the terms of the contract; quality and usability don't figure in.

(Link seen on American Digest.)


- posted by Brian J. @ 6:28 PM
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