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Tackling the Endless Stream of Bugs
How poor management can become the root cause of persistent software bugs and what to do about it.
Surely, you’ve seen it more than once: you’re developing an application and you keep finding bugs. Or even worse, with each new feature, the number of bugs grows, or fixing one bug leads to the emergence of new ones. And we’re not just talking about minor issues, but catastrophic errors that prevent normal use of the application. The experience is disastrous, and nothing seemed to stop the progression. Despite trying various strategies, there seemed to be no remedy: more and more errors kept appearing. Stopping new features to fix bugs, prioritizing defects over features, assigning employees only to bug fixing, but nothing has effect. And eventually, the viability of the application, the programming team’s capability, and even the management get questioned. Don’t you feel like playing whack-a-mole with bugs? As soon as you fix one, another comes up? How can we stop it?
Usually, when an error is this catastrophic, the first point to examine without a doubt is management. One might think it’s about firing the bad programmers and hiring new ones, or replacing the architects, but that’s not the case.
The worst employees ever… or worst managers ever?
The first example that comes to mind when I think of such a catastrophic scenario is the case of General Motors’ factory in the United States in the 1980s. This factory earned a place in history for becoming the most problematic, with the most rebellious and insubordinate workers in history. Things got so bad that employees ended up sabotaging the factory itself. So, it wasn’t that they were unqualified; they were contributing negative productivity.
And how is this an example of bad management? Weren’t the employees the problem? Here’s the twist. Since General Motors couldn’t move forward, they partnered with a Japanese company, Toyota, and together decided to open a new factory. The problem General Motors faced was where to get the workers. The Japanese made it clear: hire the workers you had before, yes, the ones who had rebelled and even sabotaged the company.
