juha riissanen's List: Lean SW Quality

• their data still shows more than a 10-fold difference between the best  programmers and the worst.

• In years since the original study, the general finding that "There are  order-of-magnitude differences among programmers" has been confirmed by many  other studies of professional programmers (Curtis 1981, Mills 1983, DeMarco and  Lister 1985, Curtis et al. 1986, Card 1987, Boehm and Papaccio 1988, Valett and  McGarry 1989, Boehm et al 2000).
• The project was critical to Boeing, and so they moved most of the 80 people off  that project and brought in one guy who finished all the coding and  delivered the software on time

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• most quality problems are systemic in nature. They have to be solved in the  boardroom by making a company-wide commitment to building quality into the very  systems the company uses to build products.
• quality is defined in the eye of the customer, not necessarily by arbitrary  standards loved by insiders to the production process. In today’s world, this is  increasingly important, as quality is often defined by factors beyond  reliability: design, ease of use, aesthetic appeal, and convenience
• Startups are different, leading to this axiom: if you do not know who the customer is, you  do not know what quality is.

• the minimum viable product is that version of a new product which  allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning with the least  effort.
• Remember, the minimum in minimum viable product does not mean that you should ship just  anything at the nearest possible date. It means to ship as soon as it is  possible to learn what you need to  learn.
• it’s essential to remember that these early minimum viable product launches are  not marketing launches. No press should be allowed
• As in any experiment, the important thing is not the bare fact that the  hypothesis was invalidated. More important is to understand the reasons why.
• But when it comes to the specific of a product release, business plan, or  marketing launch, all that matters is: do we have a strong hypothesis that will  enable us to learn? If so, execute, iterate, and learn. We don’t need the best  possible hypothesis. We don’t need the best possible plan. We need to get  through the build-measure-learn feedback loop with maximum speed

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