Michael Arrington was wondering how the BarakObama social network shipped so cleanly with no bugs.

I just think Michael has been seeing too many pre-release software products! Its actually possible to ship software bug free and refined if you do some basic things.

1. Get a really extensive private beta testing going - with 100′000s of people participating - like IBM did with Lotus Connect. And don;t let anyone know about it. Keep it behind a Firewall.

2. Get a really loyal set of users providing you great feedback and bug reports - again all in private.

3. Use as much pre-existing code as possible. Which is apprently what Blue Light did for BarakObama.com. In fact I bet they did all three.

4. Now do at least 3 or 4 turns of the crank, each time iteraing refining and trying out new appreoaches. Only until the code is up and running and being used - can you POSSIBLY refine it - so any code that ships refines means it’s been beaten on extensively.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 12th, 2007 at 10:26 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.