Two things contribute to unhappy customers: bugs and late delivery. A bug is generally referred to as a feature in the application that does not work according to the customer’s expectations. This can be due to an unspecified or misunderstood requirement or just a mistake in the development of the software. Either way, bugs not only frustrate the customer, they considerably expand the project’s cost and timeline.

Making an effort to catch bugs at the earliest point in the life cycle will result in a higher return on investment (ROI). The cost of fixing a bug differs depending on the stage of development it is caught in.

• Requirements Stage: Bugs caught in the requirements writing stage simply cost the time to rewrite the requirement. Time spent in this stage is usually constant.

• Coding Stage: Bugs caught here require developer hours. Time varies but is considerably less than fixing a bug found by someone else. When a bug is found during this stage, the developer discovers it, already understands the problem, and often knows how to fix it.

• Integration Stage: Bugs caught here require developer and other system engineer hours. Time is usually at least twice as much, since the problem occurs at a higher level and there is a need to figure out which exact code or configuration is wrong. 

• Testing Stage: Bugs caught here require developer, system engineer, PM, and QA hours. The process is much larger than before. Now things need to be tracked and prioritized. This now requires finding reproduction steps, submitting a bug, prioritizing the bug, meeting with developers, fixing the bug, pushing the fix to the test environment, verifying the fix, and tracking the changes of the bug in the system.

• Production Stage: Bugs caught here require developer, support, system engineer, PM, customer, and QA hours. This process always involves all of the roles. It requires more planning and more prioritizing than in the testing stage. Usually a phone call comes to support, and they decide if it's a bug or if it’s working as designed. The customer is notified, the PM is contacted, and then the process in the testing stage is followed. 

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One of the first steps in building global software is to recognize that many assumptions Americans often hold about how people’s names work are not universally true. Much of the software used by the Church use people’s names, and we’ve found an amazing amount of diversity in the name-related traditions of different cultures. Can you distinguish fact from fiction in the name myths?

Myth 1:

The concepts “first name” and “last name” are consistent across cultures. 

False. In America, we use the Western name order, and so Americans instinctively know that the last name in George Timothy Clooney is also the family name. By contrast, several other cultures place names in the Eastern order, always listing the family name first. For example, the Chinese will always use Jacki Chan’s Chinese name in the order “Chan Kong Sang”, and they know that the first name “Chan” is the family name.

As a result, if you label name fields in your global software with the position-based terms FirstName and LastName, you may not get what you expect.

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When you shut the door of a new BMW, you hear a gratifyingly solid-sounding thump. It feels good to pick up a small, unassuming digital camera, only to find that it is surprisingly sturdy and heavy. Many companies who make physical objects use fine materials and many other techniques to give their products a sense of quality and craftsmanship.

In a world of cheap plastic and sloppy details, I’ve noticed that the feel of a nicely handcrafted object brings me much gratification—and sometimes even endears an object to me. This realization has made me wonder, “What is the Web equivalent?”

The Web’s expansion has exploded. In fact, over the last ten years, the number of Web sites has grown from a few million to somewhere around 150 million. With so many new Web sites being created daily, it becomes difficult for people who are involved in creating Web sites to find and identify a quality Web experience. It’s easy for our Web experience expectations to become low.

Even though a Web site isn’t something you can pick up and feel, there are many effective ways you can create the feeling of quality. The following attributes are just a few of the tips and tricks that I have found that work together to give a Web site that feeling of quality.

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Question

What do you do at the Church?

Answer

Question

What role do you think program management plays in the Church organization?

Answer

Program management acts as a liaison between ICS and other Church departments. We are able to build relationships with our customers to understand their needs and provide solutions to help them achieve their goals.

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Over the past decade, search has been revolutionized by companies like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. Today, it is uncommon to go to a Web site that does not contain a search box. Search efficiency and accuracy greatly affect the user’s experience. The Church has a lot of wonderful content that we want the public to have easy access to.

On a few of our recent projects, we have leveraged new tools that are proving to be very beneficial to our content-driven Web sites. With the large amounts of content that are created and stored on Church Web sites, it has become apparent that using proprietary content management not only restricts us from having free access to our content, but also wastes time and money.

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You may have seen a few Church videos on YouTube, but did you know the Church has an official channel on YouTube called Mormon Messages? The Mormon Messages Channel features regular, fresh videos produced by the Church’s Audiovisual (AV) Department, posted each Friday. Each video lasts about three minutes and focuses on a single message communicated in an engaging way.

The small AV team that creates these videos puts them together without much time—usually in few days with a crew of only two or three people. They often have to shoot new video to match the message they want to convey. For example, for the Easter video of Elder Holland, two members of the AV crew went to Utah Lake to capture video of a shoreline for a scene depicting the Sea of Galilee.

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