In Software Development, cosmetic defects gradually and eventually hurt much
Category: How Software is managed 1 Comment »Have you been bitten by an ant? Did it hurt much or was it just itchy?
Have you imagined being thrown to an ant nest? People might get killed from a whole herd of these small creatures.
The same visualization happens to the quality of software products.
Cosmetic and Severity
In a software project, Severity of a defect is often weighed on different levels. Through the terminology might vary, four levels are usually used: Critical, Major, Minor, and Cosmetic.
- Critical is when the defect hangs the program or stops the business completely
- Major is when a the program yields an unexpected result or a business rule is violated severely
- Minor is when an unexpected result can be neglected or a word-around can be used
- Cosmetic refers to usability issues, misspelled words, graphical designs like indent or color palette
Critical ones always receive highest priority to be fixed immediately. Major and Minor ones depend on the complexity and cost of the defect.
What I want to discuss here is Cosmetic defects.
Cosmetic are trivial
Since Cosmetic defects don’t normally stop the business or make transactions go wrong, they usually receive lowest priority. Next, because everyone is busy, every team is busy, these defects might never be solved and just stay there in the bug-tracking system.
“Cosmetic ones are trivial to fix”, said many developers. Yes, one defect on font size or misspelled word may take no more than 5 minutes to be complete flushed. And yet, it is trivial to be fixed…
However, on some occasions, cosmetic defects are one of the hardest ones to debug. It happened once when my team was developing a state-of-the-art system on .NET 3.0 beta in 2005. Because the platform was still in beta, many controls such as grid were not fully supported. When data in the grid could not be managed, the R&D team managed to code the control themselves. It took the three men 2 months for this task. 66 man-days was not an easy number, but since the customer wanted it so badly, on the way they went… Half a year later, the control were fully supported by Microsoft!
Well, the story above is just one exception, let’s get back to our commonly accepted perspective: Cosmetic defects are so trivial they simply itch rather than hurt anyone.
However, from the other side of the line, things are 179 degree different…
The customer simply doesn’t see as a developer sees, or vice versa
The time of “give me a useful application” has long passed. Customers nowadays yeld for “useful and beautiful suites”. Sad but true, users take for granted the functionalities a system has to offer; they don’t care the perfect architecture the development team may be very proud of. This is true it hurts.
Quick ‘n’ flick Google products, highly elegant Apple products and glossy Web 2.0 design are some of the things that plant the desire for beauties in software users today. Presenting users a messy, inconsistent system with easy-to-spot mistakes upsets them greatly, and expect recession in sales figure.
To make things worse, with more communication channels than ever information travel so fast within vertical communities that the brand of the software might be severely “injured”.
Conclusion
Is it time we reconsidered how critical Cosmetic defects have grown to be? I believe no time is better than now to sit down and put our hands on these trivial, 5-minute improvables.
Tags of this article: .net,branding,client-management,configuration,consulting,expectation,How Business Analysts work,How Marketing is done,microsoft,priority,project-management,sales,severity,usability.
Last update July 12, 2008
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