What Price Quality?

Jerry Weinberg discusses quality in Quality Software Management: Systems Thinking with an anecdote about a book his niece wrote. In the story, her book is released with significant sections missing due to bugs in the word processor she was using.

Weinberg happened to be working for the company that produced it and asked the project manager what was going on. The manager said that they knew about the issues but were unlikely to fix them any time soon:

... out of more than a hundred thousand customers we probably didn't have ten [who might have seen these problems] ... Eventually we'll probably fix them, but for now, chances are we would introduce a worse bug - one that would affect hundreds or thousands of customers. I believe we did the right thing.

This situation motivates Weinberg's idea that quality is relative, encapsulated in the famous definition linking quality to value:

Quality is value to some person

Hundreds of thousands of customers get value from this particular product and many will consider it high quality. His neice ... well, not so much of either.

In The Shape of Actions Harry Collins and Martin Kusch link the value of some technology to the extent to which we are prepared to accommodate its behaviour.

They call this Repair, Attribution and all That, and illustrate it by describing a calculator whch returns 6.9999996 for the calculation (7/11) x 11. The human operator understands that this really "means" 7 and will correct for it wherever the data is actually used.

With those things in mind, it was fun to read a recent article in The Verge, Scientists rename human genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates, where a long-standing issue with the use of Excel in genetics had been worked around by changing genetics:

... over the past year or so, some 27 human genes have been renamed, all because Microsoft Excel kept misreading their symbols as dates ... when a user inputs a gene’s alphanumeric symbol into a spreadsheet, like MARCH1 — short for "Membrane Associated Ring-CH-Type Finger 1" — Excel converts that into a date: 1-Mar.

This is extremely frustrating, even dangerous, corrupting data that scientists have to sort through by hand to restore. It’s also surprisingly widespread and affects even peer-reviewed scientific work. One study from 2016 examined genetic data shared alongside 3,597 published papers and found that roughly one-fifth had been affected by Excel errors.

[...]

Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment, but [coordinator of HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee, Elspeth Bruford]’s theory is that it’s simply not worth the trouble to change. "This is quite a limited use case of the Excel software," she says. "There is very little incentive for Microsoft to make a significant change to features that are used extremely widely by the rest of the massive community of Excel users."

Fun, yes, but it also makes me wonder: what price quality? who pays? how?
Image: https://flic.kr/p/26zeSd7

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