Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

An old saying remains true: the later we find a mistake, the more expensive it is to fix.

The later we find a mistake, the more expensive it is to fix. That is an old saying. It is still true.

The saying is most-often attributed to Barry Boehm as he described it in the Cost of Change Curve. Some of us are old enough to remember the writings of Boehm. I actually met him one day at a conference. Nice enough fellow.

From time to time, we pretend that this thought is something old that applied in olden times when we used old technology to solve old problems. We are in a new age with new minds and everything new and, well, old sayings by old men are just old.

Sorry, if we find and fix a problem just prior to shipping our app, it really hurts. The problem has ties to many things and all those things have to be fixed. Well, they don’t have to be fixed, but shipping mistakes bothers some of us to no end.

On shipping day, everything has tentacles. (I just learned that an octopus has arms but no tentacles while a jellyfish has hundreds of tentacles, but I digress.) Some reach too far and too wide. Rats! (more animals) And we just discovered more tentacles. Darn those tentacles. No more dry humor that isn’t humorous.

Dr. Boehm’s thoughts are still correct. The later we find the mistake, the more it costs to correct.

What really hurts sometimes is that it is not a mistake found late. It is a new idea introduced late. Whatever the source, we have a late change, and the later the change the more the expense. Can’t seem to avoid that.

Let’s do better.