Archive for January, 2011

We all seen this picture:

… and we all know this is the truth and cruel reality. Or is it?

I’ve heard about companies that are concentrating on fixing bugs really fast when they are discovered by the end user, instead of trying to find them before production. How on earth could that save time and money?

Perhaps there are some products/system that are really easy to release. Then it might be possible. But what about the customer satisfaction? If I was the user and I found a lot of really serious bugs in my product I would be really angry, even if I got a fix just a couple of days later.

The company is relying on the end users to report the bugs and updating to a new version.

But are there any other better to test a product/system than the end users!?! They know what is really important and what is not. But still… how do you manage to keep the end users happy? I can only think of one situation where end users do the job and are still happy, and that is the game industry where there often are a lot of end users doing test on beta versions.

Is this a new trend? Will all testers be out of work? No, I don’t think so. There are a couple of products that this never will work on. For example, pacemaker. You can’t rely on the end user to report any bugs. They’ll never get the chance!