The Speed vs Quality Tradeoff in Software Development

The Speed vs Quality Tradeoff in Software Development

There are two broad categories of criticism we get in Zoho Creator (and Zoho in general):

1. I asked for this simple thing months, years ago, it is still not done. Is your development team sleeping?

2. How can you put this bug? Is your QA team sleeping?

In fact, sometimes the same person would offer both of these criticisms, at once. Let me first say that we have shipped over 20 services in Zoho and we are now on our 7th year. The broader Zoho Corp itself has over 60 products, and has been in business for over 15 years. So we have some experience with software development. Our managers are seasoned, they have gone through a lot of cycles.

A few things I have learned about software productivity over time is that a) small teams are dramatically more productive than large teams  b) there is a natural speed limit in a particular product/team, that is a function of the inherent complexity of the technology involved and the skill level of the team.

Now let's put those two together. When teams/products hit their speed limit, a very tempting solution is to increase the team size. In the early stages, when the team is very small, this can work. But at some point, even before the team is very large, it becomes counter-productive. At that point, adding people to a team can actually cause things to slow down even more.

Now, on the quality issue. Ultimately, quality can never be tested into software. We keep increasing our test coverage and the number of test cases, we keep increasing the time in the release cycle that is devoted to testing, but this is an arms race that testing would lose. Software grows exponential in complexity (think of interactions between various modules and subsystems) but tests grow only linearly with team size. 

So to come back to the title: both speed and quality are ultimately subject to the God of Software Complexity. If we do not get complexity down, we can achieve quality only by pushing development to a stand-still. 

These things explain why software can be so maddening. Simple things sometimes take too long, and bugs creep into even well tested software. We see this every major piece of software out there has been, not just from Zoho. 

Interestingly, this is the topic that I have thought about a lot. Deluge itself is an outcome of these observations and thoughts. 

The key question we have asked ourselves is: how can we systematically reduce complexity in software, so that both speed and quality improve?

I am happy to report that we are making progress on that front. Over the next couple of years, Zoho Creator is poised for some interesting new developments. I won't talk about them too much, primarily because I don't like to hype things up, but I am quite excited.

One thing I will say: Zoho Creator is the cornerstone of our entire complexity-reduction strategy. We are betting on it heavily internally. That is the best assurance I can provide customers on the viability of this platform long term.

Sridhar




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