Fixing All the Bugs Won't Solve All the Problems – Deming's Path of Frustration

Re:Fixing All the Bugs Won't Solve All the Problems – Deming... by skmurphy on Thursday April 11, 2024 @10:12PM (#40008796)

The renewed growth and increasing customer satisfaction--and our long-term success--were due to engineering abandoning a poorly thought-out policy before it crippled us instead of merely hampering us.

Part of the challenge in a "freeze spec" approach implicit in "only fix bugs" is that it assumes the market requirements are well established. That was definitely not the case for Internet protocols/functionality in 1992. HTTP traffic did not exist yet (along with a couple of dozen other things that would quickly become dominant by 1997.

The effect of the bug fix stall was to give our more nimble competitors more growth and more runway. The fact that Cisco did very well was despite the "just fix bugs" mandate.

I offered the story because I thought some folks reading the linked post would find it unbelievable that a company would decide to fixate on a single simple metric when operating in a complex and evolving environment.

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Re:Fixing All the Bugs Won't Solve All the Problems – Deming... by kazinator on Friday April 12, 2024 @01:12AM (#40009568)

You have to do both, on different branches. Rearchitect things in one branch, fix nothing but bugs in another. Forward port all the bugfixes you can from one to the other.

Though: version control ... 1992 ... haha.

Hey, that's when that unwieldy behemoth ClearCase was released.

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Re:Fixing All the Bugs Won't Solve All the Problems – Deming... by pjc50 on Friday April 12, 2024 @04:33AM (#40010512)

I think that approach would be doomed even in the present day. Multiple "legacy" release branches is very hard to manage. Only the very largest such as Microsoft can do it, and they clearly hate doing so and want to push to rolling releases like everyone else.

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Re:Fixing All the Bugs Won't Solve All the Problems – Deming... by worthless-trash on Friday April 12, 2024 @10:25AM (#40013287)

Red Hat / RHEL does this on all EUS release every day, on RHEL 6,7,8,9.

Tell me more about how you would subscribe to a MS "bugfix only channel of updates" ? This is my first time hearing about that.

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Re:Fixing All the Bugs Won't Solve All the Problems – Deming... by pjc50 on Friday April 12, 2024 @10:31AM (#40013364)

> bugfix only channel of updates

Isn't that what's meant by LTS?

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Re:Fixing All the Bugs Won't Solve All the Problems – Deming... by worthless-trash on Monday April 15, 2024 @02:28AM (#40037573)

Do you just 'install' the msi, and then thats LTS ?

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Re:Fixing All the Bugs Won't Solve All the Problems – Deming... by pjc50 on Friday April 12, 2024 @04:35AM (#40010521)

> our more nimble competitors

Who was competing with Cisco in 1992? I struggle to remember. They were so dominant in the "dotcom" era (late 90s) that it felt like they were the only choice, the "IBM" of enterprise networking hardware.

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