What Software Developers can learn from Toyota's mistake
Unless you have been living under a rock by now you must have heard the acceleration issues with Toyota and their production and sales halts. You can catch up on the story here
Toyota has always been a leading and reliable car manufacturer, innovator in manufacturing processes and known for bold initiatives like 'andon cord'. I have read references to Toyota's processes in web/lean development books where the Toyota example is used to explain/promote importance of a single employee, importance of lean development etc.
Here is a snippet from the above article about 'andon cord', its a very powerful concept, which proves that how much a company cares about employees and end product quality.
In Toyota lore, the ultimate symbol of the company’s attention to detail is the “andon cord,” a rope that workers on the assembly line can pull if something is wrong, immediately shutting down the entire line. The point is to fix a small problem before it becomes a larger one.
However in this acceleration case Toyota was in denial and now its blow out of proportion causing loss off billions of dollars revenue.
But in the broadest sense, Toyota itself failed to pull the andon cord on this issue, and treated a growing safety issue as a minor glitch — a point the company’s executives are now acknowledging in a series of humbling apologies.
The lesson to be learned here is to not get into 'denial' phase without a deep understanding of the problem. When engineers get onto help customers using their software, you hear things like 'we tested the exact same scenario on a very similar hardware/network setup, this does not seem to be our software issue", huh ? That is denial and can get the 'software owners' into big trouble at the end. The right approach is to assume there is a software problem but still evaluate holistically and drill down to the specifics, if you go with an attitude of its not my problem one would never find the problem, Toyota is your proof. You could have the best brains building the software with the most advanced development processes but there are always issues.
