constellex

Do you remember when vending machines used to work? Yea, me neither. I had a run-in with a vending machine the other day and then realized every time I use a vending machine, I’m always a little bit frightened it’s going to either not drop the goods, not allow me to get change back, or steal my money entirely. Usually this happens when I put in the last of my change. Why is this a problem that plagues the vending machine industry? Are vending machines extremely hard to maintain, have a high failure rate, or just terribly designed in general?

So when did it suddenly become acceptable for software to be released in a similarly poor quality. Is the software industry utilizing the broken vending machine effect? You can usually see this software tagged with a beta stamp, to protect the producer’s credibility. I’m not going to spend this blog post discussing specific instances of poor software, this is more of a piece of advice for any consumers of software: Do NOT accept poor software quality. If the software stinks, don’t support it.

And for the developers out there: The word beta is not reserved for releasing unreliable software. Beta is reserved for released software you’d like to be reviewed in order to determine if it solves the customer’s requirements. You can release it to a limited number of users with a limited feature set and call it beta, but only introduce new features once they are extensively tested internally.

If you can think of quality software in your life, you’ll probably realize you think it is quality because it always works the way you expect it to. For you consumers out there, don’t always be afraid to use software from smaller companies, usually those companies are started by people who are actually passionate about software.

Software developed by passionate people is usually of much higher quality than software supported by those who are not passionate.