Re: Schedule, Cost, & Quality: Pick Two

[SteveFJong -at- aol -dot- com]

Jeanne A. E. DeVoto" <jaed -at- jaedworks -dot- com> wrote, "[The best writer you can 
hire] will cost more than the run-of-the-mill writer whose work will require 
more re-checking and correction; you have spent more but gained
quality without sacrificing time. Hence the '2[good, fast, cheap]' rule
holds. No?"

I'm glad you asked that, Jeanne 8^) Re-checking and correction costs money, 
both for the person(s) doing the checking, and for the writer to make the 
corrections. Then there's the cost of original work done and subsequently 
scrapped. The later in any process an error is found, the more expensive it 
is to correct. (The best example is the Pentium chip math error; it would 
have cost Intel maybe $50 for an ECO in the design stage, but recalling chips 
from the field and replacing them cost the company a reported 
$1,000,000,000.) Watts Humphrey, the software process guru, said that he 
found that the programmer who makes the most mistakes is the most expensive 
to the organization, regardless of salary or productivity.

By the way, in my original message on this thread, I used the word 
"orthogonal" in exactly the wrong way. Ouch! As I said, I find it more 
expensive to correct my mistake than to have gotten it right the first time 
8^(

          -- Steve

Steven Jong, Documentation Team Manager ("Typo?  What tpyo?")
Lightbridge, Inc., 67 South Bedford St., Burlington, MA 01803 USA
mailto:jong -at- lightbridge -dot- com -dot- nospam          781.359.4902 [voice]
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