Jinn of Quality and Risk

Many contradictions ... can be found in design books. These contradictions are very confusing and quite overwhelming, and make it difficult to answer a simple question such as what colors do I use on my webpage? Even worse, what if someone only refers to one book (which most people would do), and that one book is the one that suggests green [text] on red [background] or yellow on white? Both green on yellow and black on medium grey seem to be good colour choices. I'd like to see additional research taking a larger spectrum of colour combinations into account. 

Not only are Web merchants frequently oblivious to malfunctions on their sites, but even once they become aware of the problems, they are often unable to determine their cause quickly and fix them. The New York Times reports reasonably well on common software problems and hints at some causes, but we can be more explicit about root causes:

• IT companies rarely develop the expertise to understand the experience of the user and improve it;
• development schedules and costs are reduced in competitive bids that ignore the user experience as well as maintenance costs (think continous improvement, exemplified by Amazon.com);
• labour costs are cut down by employing inexperienced engineers who are utterly ignorant of fundamental software engineering approaches (such as code inspection, reuse, fault-tolerance, concurrent programming, and distributed applications);
• few if any people in the software industry perform meaningful after-action reviews (aka debriefs or post-mortems); and
• even fewer people take the time to understand published case studies, let alone their own lessons learnt, if any.

The Internet frenzy probably made things worse. 

China is planning to launch its first mission to the Moon in 2010. Our long-term goal is to set up a base on the Moon and mine its riches for the benefit of humanity. Maybe America will wake up and do something interesting on the Moon...