I loved those sandwich guys; it totally made their day to construct me something new each lunchtime. Once they slapped mustard between two slices and handed it over, laughing their heads off. It was awesome.
There is one important story from the offsite meeting that created the ZD memo. Chris Mason agreed to write the memo that was the work of the group and we were all OK with that because Chris was the person who created the breakthrough. We were basically stuck, kind of pointing fingers and/or throwing up our hands about the problem until Chris broke the logjam by saying something to the effect, "Here is what I think I do that contributes to the problem." That allowed all of us to start being at least a little honest about what the negative factors were. That's how we got to the statements about the wrong person writes too much code and other personal responsibility factors expressed in the memo. Chris' decision to be self-critical was good leadership and taught us all an important lesson.
This is amazing. In my career it became pretty clear that industrial grade software development did not happen at computer manufacturers and significant improvements seem to come in enterprises and their efforts to have stable, reliable systems. When software became the business, the need for an engineering discipline was also up against some serious mythology. The ZD pursuit is very impressive.
We were developing Windows apps starting with Windows 1.0 on PCs. There were no good Windows debug tools available from Microsoft at the time. To be able to debug we wrote some assembly code that would output text to a secondary EGA (or VGA?) monitor. So on the main monitor you would see your windows app running and on the secondary monitor you would see debug information in real time. The Windows app source code would have conditional if debug PrintDebug statements in it. We got rid of a lot of bugs that way.
Its fascinating to read the Word post mortem in this day and age. I glanced over the the table with the roster of people involved and my first reaction was that must be the folks who got to do the post mortem. Nope... that's everyone who worked on the product. Ever.
Did you find that BillG, SteveB and others at the top would actively push this Zero Defects approach as well? Or did the Memo start at the mid-high level and then became like a ‘spiritual’ document amongst the workers. Always interesting to see if the upper management also lived by the same principles and/or they (like BillG) helped convey the value of the Zero Defects memo..
I loved those sandwich guys; it totally made their day to construct me something new each lunchtime. Once they slapped mustard between two slices and handed it over, laughing their heads off. It was awesome.
There is one important story from the offsite meeting that created the ZD memo. Chris Mason agreed to write the memo that was the work of the group and we were all OK with that because Chris was the person who created the breakthrough. We were basically stuck, kind of pointing fingers and/or throwing up our hands about the problem until Chris broke the logjam by saying something to the effect, "Here is what I think I do that contributes to the problem." That allowed all of us to start being at least a little honest about what the negative factors were. That's how we got to the statements about the wrong person writes too much code and other personal responsibility factors expressed in the memo. Chris' decision to be self-critical was good leadership and taught us all an important lesson.
This is amazing. In my career it became pretty clear that industrial grade software development did not happen at computer manufacturers and significant improvements seem to come in enterprises and their efforts to have stable, reliable systems. When software became the business, the need for an engineering discipline was also up against some serious mythology. The ZD pursuit is very impressive.
We were developing Windows apps starting with Windows 1.0 on PCs. There were no good Windows debug tools available from Microsoft at the time. To be able to debug we wrote some assembly code that would output text to a secondary EGA (or VGA?) monitor. So on the main monitor you would see your windows app running and on the secondary monitor you would see debug information in real time. The Windows app source code would have conditional if debug PrintDebug statements in it. We got rid of a lot of bugs that way.
Its fascinating to read the Word post mortem in this day and age. I glanced over the the table with the roster of people involved and my first reaction was that must be the folks who got to do the post mortem. Nope... that's everyone who worked on the product. Ever.
Did you find that BillG, SteveB and others at the top would actively push this Zero Defects approach as well? Or did the Memo start at the mid-high level and then became like a ‘spiritual’ document amongst the workers. Always interesting to see if the upper management also lived by the same principles and/or they (like BillG) helped convey the value of the Zero Defects memo..