Jeff Bonwick was the gatekeeper for Solaris 2.5. He gave a talk on Solaris to the Sun Systems Group in September, 1994. It included a section on the Quality Death Spiral -- a timeless phenomenon that remains our omnipresent fear:
if it's broken, rip it out
- FCS* quality all the time
- put it back today, 20 of your (current) friends
will be running it tomorrow
- gate breakage grinds other development to a halt
- the product, not any one project, is what matters
- mistakes will happen; negligence cannot
FCS* quality all the time -- why is this so important?
- only way to avoid the quality death spiral:
- people hear the gate is broken
- decide not to risk a bringover
- fewer people run the latest stuff
- less real-life testing
- new bugs not found
- quality drops further
- morale tracks quality
- downward spiral hard to break
- recovery time can be very long
*FCS == First Customer Ship
(Sourced from http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Community+Group+on/qual_death_spiral)
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