s-luv-j

Every time I read an HBR article it is a little like listening to a highly process oriented MBA wonder aloud about how to innovate.

You are 100% right that measuring the process of creating software is a terrible application of statistical process control. See Jira.

One way to look at how Deming/Shewart's work applies to software is to consider what happens when you apply their statistical analysis techniques to running software.

One of the reasons why pushing change straight to production with A/B testing works so well is that you can expose your new change to statistically significant real user load and, assuming your have decent instrumentation, find the problems. This does mean that a subset of your users get exposed to those problems.

A more user friendly way would be to have a scaled down replica of production setup with simulators that mimic user behavior. Assuming the development team actually believes in and tends this environment, they will find the lion's share of bugs that commonly slip through peer review.

"You can not inspect quality into a product." ~Deming

Yep. This applies double to software. Putting software under load and trending health measures to look for two standard deviations variance is very similar to how Deming instrumented production lines. The neat thing that software enables for both automobile manufacturing and software products themselves is that those exact same health measures can be trended and analyzed after they get into the hands of consumers.

If your quality apparatus is purely inspection based, you will live your life one escalation to the next.

Is it just me, or have C++ errors gotten a lot better? Below example from guide seems a lot more ergonomic than in years past.

  test.cpp: In instantiation of ‘T add(T, T) [with T = std::basic_string<char>]’:
  test.cpp:17:21:   required from here
  test.cpp:11:22: error: static assertion failed
   11 |   static_assert(std::is_integral_v<T>);
      |                 ~~~~~^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
  test.cpp:11:22: note: ‘std::is_integral_v<std::basic_string<char> >’ evaluates to false