It is still in its early stages of development, and it is becoming a more and more important part of our business and personal lives. As a result, we need and must learn to develop systems that are easy to use, flexible to change, and economical to maintain. OCR for page 339 John A. Meyer 339 The quality of most software today is very poor. It is difficult to change, prone to error, and costly to maintain. This is particularly true of application software that has been around for a while.
Software is where manufacturing was thirty years go.
In the 196Os General Motors assembled an automobile, tested it, and, if it worked, shipped it. Quality can be measured, and it must be continuously improved. There is little to no concern for qual- ity. We need to build the same quality into software that successful com- panies build into their manufactured products. We need to evaluate soft- ware against the same standards of best practices and initiate the same processes of continuous improvement that we do in manufacturing.