The U.S. Software Industry and Software Quality: Another Detroit in the Making?

"The reason we come up with new versions
is not to fix bugs. It's absolutely not. It's the stupidest reason
to buy a new version that I've ever heard.... And so, in so sense,
is [software] stability a reason to move to a new version. It's
never a reason. You won't get a single person to say they'd buy a
new version because of bugs."--Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft Corporation, in an interview
with reporter Klaus Brunnstein (Focus,
November 1995)Do computer users care about quality? Linux advocates hope
so, because it's unquestionably the case that open-source
development methods are capable of producing some very fine
software indeed. As open-source guru Eric Raymond points out, the
nature of open-source development - such as the wide-open
availability of the underlying source code, the ongoing testing of
code in real-world settings, the frequent release cycles - can
produce code that's remarkably free from programming errors. The
sheer number of developers helps, too; as Linus Torvalds puts it,
"With enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."To be sure, not every program developed with open-source
methods is as beautifully crafted as the Linux kernel, but there's
no disputing the fact that open-source development can indeed
produce software of exceptional quality. If quality matters, Linux
ought to have an edge over its commercial competitors. According to
one estimate by a Microsoft internal (see Minasi 2000:255), the
firm's products typically contain an average of 14 to 17 errors per
1,000 lines of code - a level of quality that can be described as
mediocre. But people keep buying Microsoft products. Vendor
executives, Microsoft's among them, look at their profits and ask
why they should bother improving their firms' software. Sure, they
admit, it's possible to produce software of space-shuttle quality,
but doing so is very expensive. Maybe that level of quality is
needed in life-critical systems, such as medical software, but who
needs a quality word processor? Consumers don't care, they
conclude, and so they keep putting out products that are "good
enough".They're wrong. Dead wrong. Consumers have been putting up
with bug-ridden software for one simple reason: They don't realize
there is an alternative. And once they find out, commercial
software vendors are going to lose a big slice of their business.
Where's my evidence for this claim? History. I'm sure you've heard
the famous Santayana quote: "Those who do not remember the past are
condemned to repeat it." (No, that's not a typo; it's Santayana the
philosopher, not Santana the guitarist.) If you're looking for an
example, I've got a doozy for you. According to Mark Minasi, author
of a very fine book entitled The Software
Conspiracy (McGraw-Hill, 2000), the U.S. commercial
software industry is making exactly the same mistake that U.S. auto
makers once made, and the results could prove catastrophic to the
U.S. economy.Then: Fins and Features (But Underneath, It's
Junk)Flash back to the 1950s, and take a look at the average new
car produced by one of Detroit's "Big Three" auto makers (GM, Ford,
and Chrysler). You'd see lots of cool features: big, gutsy V-8
engines, flashy chrome bumpers, and (in 1957, anyway) fins that
made the cars look like low-flying rockets.If you owned one of these monsters, though, you'd discover
another, less-appealing characteristic: shoddiness. The cars were
riddled with defects and needed frequent repairs. They weren't
safe, either, and they were murder on the environment. Instead of
improving their products and making them safer and less polluting,
the Big Three auto makers went to work on the politicians. They did
everything they could to ward off legislation to give consumers
protections against lemons. They opposed air bags. They tried to
fight off pollution standards. In today's markedly more corrupt
political environment, they probably would have succeeded.They also went to work on consumers. Money that could have
gone into improving their products, as well as making them safer
and less polluting, went into advertising and marketing instead.
The goal? Get consumers back into the showroom every two or three
years to buy a new car with new, up-to-date styling. Under the
hood, of course, they got the same old junk.Call it shortsightedness, if you'd like, or just plain greed,
but the Big Three auto makers couldn't see a financial incentive
for improving their products. So they didn't. They knew the cars
were junk. They knew they were unsafe. Sure, every once in a while,
they had little twinges of conscience - such as when an auto
executive's kid was killed in a fiery crash, one that could been
prevented had the company paid more attention to safety. They felt
terrible for a few days. (You can read the
whole, sick story in J. Patrick Wright's On a Clear Day
You Can See General Motors, published in 1979.) But all
such concerns were sacrificed to the Bottom Line. When challenged
to defend their low-quality cars, the auto makers complained that
the cost of building quality automobiles was simply too high; it
could be done, but you'd pay at least half again as much for that
shiny new Chevy. Consumers were content with the low quality/low
price tradeoff, the auto makers believed. Consumers
are buying the cars, they pointed out. The
auto makers were raking in fabulous profits, and making a fantastic
contribution to the economy.In fact, consumers weren't content with
the cars (or the dealers, but that's another story). Still,
complaining didn't get them anywhere, and for one simple reason:
there wasn't any competition. If U.S. cars were shoddy, they looked
like the space shuttle next to British cars, which (lamentably)
lacked the capital to do anything about their endemic quality
problems. Sure, there were some little Japanese companies that were
making funny-looking, inexpensive cars, but these companies weren't
a threat to Detroit, the auto makers believed. Japanese car makers
didn't know anything about marketing and style, and that's what
sells cars in the U.S.You probably know the rest of the story. For years, U.S.
industrial quality guru W. Edwards Deming tried to convince Detroit
that it was possible to make high-quality products, and in
addition, it's not much more expensive to do so, as long as you
design the quality into the product at the beginning of production
instead of trying to fix the problems at the end. But Demming's
words fell on deaf ears - except in Japan.Japanese car makers took Demming's teachings to heart, and
they started making some exceptionally fine automobiles. What's
more, they were cheap. The result? Japanese auto makers grabbed
nearly a third of the U.S. market and most of the international
market. As a result, thanks to mounting Japanese automobile exports
and the collapse of the U.S. auto industry overseas, the U.S. was
plunged into the ranks of the world's debtor nations.Detroit's story should be clearly understood by everyone who
wishes to grasp the significance of shortsighted, bottom-line
thinking in corporations besotted by too much testosterone. Sure,
you make money. In reality, though, you're doing so only by
mortgaging your country's future. You're pushing for laws that, if
passed, would have rolled consumer and environmental protection
back to the Dark Ages. You're creating lasting ill will in a market
that despises your products, and looks desperately for an
alternative. And if you fail to keep your competitors out of the
market, you go down - and you take a huge slice of the economy with
you. But who cares? Your kids and grandkids will pay, not
you.Now: Featuritus - and Bugs GaloreToday's commercial software packages have much in common with
shoddy U.S. automobiles of the 1950s and 1960s, according to the
software industry's critics. It's basically the same formula: put
out shoddy products, and use high-pressure marketing to keep
consumers focused on new software versions that offer glitzy new
features. In reality, you're hoodwinking people into buying the
same defective product over and over again, but hey - you make tons
of money. And who cares about quality, anyway? Sure, industry
executives concede, we could reduce the number of bugs in our
products, they say, but only by raising the price of our products
by 50 percent or more - and consumers won't stand for it. Quality?
We'll give you "good enough" quality, and that's all you're going
to get.It's incredibly cavalier of these companies to say that
quality isn't needed in products such as word processors,
spreadsheet programs and the rest. People have lost jobs, flunked
classes, and contemplated jumping off bridges after software
glitches destroyed work that was critical to them. And these very
same products are finding their way into virtually every aspect of
life, including situations in which human life and limb could very
well be at stake if the e-mail doesn't get through. Shoddy,
bug-ridden software isn't safe to use under
any condition, and these companies know it. My
evidence? Instead of improving their products, commercial software
vendors are busily trying to rewrite U.S. and international law to
shield themselves from the consequences of their corporate
negligence. In the U.S., Microsoft has taken the lead in pushing
for the passage of UCITA, a state-level legislative act that has
been opposed by every consumer rights organization that has ever
examined the issue, as well as by 23 U.S. Attorneys General and
computing professional organizations, who correctly describe the
legislation as a major setback not only for consumers, but also for
public safety.Sounds like the Detroit game all over again, doesn't it? But
wait: there's more. Inspired by Demming's writings, software
development expert Watts Humphrey - an ex-IBM executive who is now
affiliated with Carnegie-Mellon University's Software Engineering
Institute (SEI) - developed a version of Demming's work for the
software industry. And guess what? U.S. software vendors aren't
listening to Humphrey. One reason they're not listening is that
they're too busy jeering Humphrey and ridiculing his work, which is
exactly what U.S. auto-industry executives did to Demming in the
1950s. (Demming eventually gave up and moved to Japan.)What's Humphrey saying? It's simple: software companies
can make high-quality products, and what's
more, doing so isn't expensive. Humphrey's work has evolved into
the Capability Maturity Model (CMM), which
shows software developers how to build quality in from the get-go.
It also provides a way of ranking a company's commitment to
quality. At Level 1, companies aren't doing much of anything about
quality. At Level 5, they're up to the Toyota level: they're
building quality consciousness into everything they do, and they're
constantly refining and improving their processes.What's more, CMM works. Using CMM-like methods,
telecommunications giant US West Technologies was able to
reduce service outages by 79 percent, slice billing costs by $30
million, and reduce service order errors by 50 percent. There's an
upfront investment required, to be sure, but it pays off in the
long run. In 1990, the cost of ensuring quality at Raytheon
Electronics Systems ate up nearly two-thirds of all software
development costs. Thanks to CMM, Raytheon is putting out even
better software, but the cost of assuring this quality has fallen
below 10 percent of software development budgets. And what about
bugs? Based in Chennai, India, a contract software developer called
Advanced Information Services (IAS) - one of the few CMM Level 5
companies in existence - is cranking out code with only 0.05
defects per thousand lines of code. That's better than the space
shuttle's software. This level of achievement isn't putting IAS out
of business - far from it: their profits have doubled. On average,
companies that adopt CMM realize a fivefold return on their
investment.Who's listening to Humphrey? CMM critics affiliated with
Microsoft charge that CMM creates an unwieldy bureaucracy that
forestalls the kind of brilliant innovation that's leading the
software industry. Give me a break! If Microsoft supposedly
exemplifies the type of organization that would be "paralyzed" by
CMM to the point that it couldn't innovate, we might all be much
better off. As near as I can tell, the lion's share of Microsoft
products that could be termed "innovative" in some sense - MS-DOS,
Windows, FrontPage and others - either originated outside the
company, were based on ideas that were developed outside the
company, or were acquired by purchasing an outside company.
Microsoft's innovations seem limited to figuring out new ways of
introducing dysfunctional extensions to prevailing standards for no
other reason than the firm's desire to put its competitors out of
business.So who is listening? As of this writing,
only 19 software companies are certified at Level 5, and 13 of them
are in India. That's right: India. If you think India is a backward
country that couldn't possibly compete in the high-tech
sweepstakes, you'd better think again, because Indian software
companies are putting out some of the best software in the world.
Near Bangalore, India, a CMM-driven, Level 5 shop is turning
out software with 0.03 defects per thousand lines of code. Right
now in India, there's a replay of exactly the same process that
energized the Japanese automobile industry thirty years ago. They
see the opportunity. They have the talent. They know they can
create world-class software. They're doing it right now.When asked whether Indian software firms pose a threat to
their near stranglehold on the consumer software market, U.S.
software executives laugh. They point out that these silly foreign
companies don't know anything about style or marketing; there's no
way they could make it in the U.S. market. Now where have we heard
that before?What Can You Do?First, buy ten copies of Mark Minasi's exceptionally fine
book, The Software Conspiracy: Why Software Companies Put
Out Faulty Products, How They Can Hurt You, and What You Can Do
About It (McGraw-Hill, 2000) and give a copy to everyone
you know who's in a position to influence software purchasing
decisions. Mail them a copy of this article, too. My major
criticism of Mark's book is that he doesn't weave open-source
software in general, and Linux in particular, into the picture. I
believe Linux is exposing the need and the thirst for high-quality
software, and that the high quality of Linux and other open-source
programs is in large measure responsible for its rapid growth and
acceptance.Second, get the word out about UCITA. Visit
http://www.badsoftware.com
and the Consumer Project on Technology home page
(http://www.cptech.org).
If you're in a U.S. state where UCITA next comes up for
ratification, organize street protests, write letters to
legislators, get the word out, and fight it! There's still time to
defeat this monster, but we have got to get organized NOW!Third, join the battle to promote software engineering,
high-quality software, and responsible behavior by software
vendors. Read Watts Humphrey's comments on software quality at
http://www.2bguide.com/docs/whsq.html
and then visit the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at
Carnegie-Mellon University, with which Humphreys is
affiliated.Fourth, convince any organization with which you are
affiliated - your school, your company, the non-profit
organizations where you volunteer - that purchasing commercial
vendors' products is aiding and abetting a process that is exposing
the public to unwarranted risk, generating legislation that is
harmful to public welfare, and retarding the progress of
technology. Show them Linux, help them install it, and invite them
to consider what people are slowly but surely learning: you don't
have to put up with shoddy software.Bryan Pfaffenberger is a professor in the new Media Studies
program at the University of Virginia, where he will teach two
courses next fall (Media Studies 317: Intellectual Property and
Digital Media, and Media Studies 110: Information Technology and
Digital Media). He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

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