[LA.pm] contrasting London and LA

[Benjamin J. Tilly]

"Kevin Scaldeferri" <family at scaldeferri.com> wrote:
> 
> On Aug 18, 2006, at 1:32 PM, Adam Pisoni wrote:
> 
[...]
> >   We just fixed a bug on our site
> > last week caused by an engineer who was let go of 2 years ago.
> 
> Hey, if you didn't notice the bug for 2 years, how bad can it be?  
> (Tongue in cheek --  a bug that costs an imperceptible fraction of 
> a percent of revenue for years is much more expensive than one that 
> costs 10% and is, therefore, noticed and fixed in hours.)

I wouldn't be confident that a bug that costs 10% of revenue
is fixed in hours.  In fact we had one in recent memory which
went undetected for over half a year!  In our defense, our
business has such long lead times that it can be very hard to
figure out what the connection is between action and reaction.
So it really was hard to track down that THIS change caused
THAT result.

Furthermore I cannot count how many simple changes we've found
that produce more than a 5% increase in revenue.  We're not
talking rocket science.  In one case removing obvious
instructions from a form made it look simpler, so more people
completed it.  In another example adding the right graphics
did the trick.  Not doing those things isn't really a *bug*,
but it goes to show how hard it can be for an organization to
notice money left on the table.

We notice these things because we've learned to look for them.
My sense is that very few organizations even measure what
they'd need to to find them.  Let alone make looking for
improvements a standard procedure.

Cheers,
Ben