Chapter 12: A Very Gross National Product: Business and Software Problems

Overview

Businesses spenda combined total of billions of dollars per year as a result of bugs in software. In fact, you want to know the real figure? According to The Sustainable Computing Consortium, U.S. companies alone spend a combined total of over $200 billion annually as a result of bugs in software. Can you imagine such a huge figure? (If you want to read more about this, visit http://www.sustainablecomputing.org.)

And just how much do the businesses spend as a result of bad interface design? How much time is spent in training; how much time is spent fiddling with software packages; how much time is spent jumping through hoops in the software? In other words, how much time is unnecessarily wasted on software?

In this chapter I talk about just how bad this problem really is and just what exactly you can do about it. This chapter is for everybody involved: the programmers, the bosses at corporations purchasing software, and the users working in offices using the software.