Off to Finland

I'm flying to Finland today. Here the weather turned warm again, the sun is shining again today, although yesterday evening we had a massive rain fall.

This week, I've been mostly tinkering on the www.tick-the-code.com. The Info part is starting to be under control. Take a look and send me good constructive comments. It is supposed to be informative, accessible, enticing and usable. I'm sure it isn't perfect, so tell me what you don't like and how it could be better. There's even a video I produced.

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I started thinking about freedom of choice and how errors affect it. I'm trying to draw a graph including the Window of Opportunity, the ticking Timebomb of Failure and the Handcuffs of Find and Fix. The idea, which I might have mentioned earlier, is a part of the DayTick course and I try to use it to motivate people to act for quality NOW and not cry about errors later.
In the beginning you can choose to tick as much source code as you want and you do get rid of unnecessary complexity. Having less complexity in the software reduces the number of errors you are going to make, but the probability won't go to zero. This is partly because there's never quite enough time for quality and the essential complexity still remains. Software programming is hard. But in the beginning the Window of Opportunity is wide open.
So at some point you do make an error. The Timebomb starts ticking. Nobody has noticed the error yet, but eventually somebody will. That is when your Window of Opportunity for Ticking closes. You can't keep blindly ticking and hoping that the error will go away. Now you HAVE TO get rid of the error. It has to be exactly the one fault causing the failure somebody spotted, no other will do. You are handcuffed to finding and fixing the error. Your freedom returns to you only after you have managed to find and fix the reported error. The Window of Opportunity starts opening again. You can start ticking instead of the Timebomb.

When does the Timebomb of Failure go off, you ask? When a customer finds your error, instead of an internal team. The blast will shatter your and your company's reputation.