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Software product may fail: it can enter the market and get lost among the competitors. It may happen that the product will stay outside the main business and bring its 10 cents hardly paying back the maintenance efforts. It may also happen that the software will boost the market, killing the competitors by the burst wave and get a toehold in the tops. In this series of articles I would like to cover 10 characteristics which, to my opinion, follow each successful software product whether it is Facebook, Kaspersky antivirus or Angry Birds. |
Brief overview of previous series:
1. Your product is intended for specific people.
2. Your product helps people hit the target.
3. Your product solves a specific task.
4. Your product is very powerful but easy to learn.
5. Your product does what user expects.
6. Taking a product “in arms” brings pleasure.
7. Your product is reliable
This aspect is likely the most obvious.
And let’s think what we expect from a reliable software product.
First of all, when working with the product a user should be confident that s/he will not lose anything. Your customer will not lose data because the database with all backups which were located by some reason on the same hard disk with the database will not leave this world together with that hard disc. You customer will not lose time closing the application “crashed with an error” which did not save 2- hours-work-worth document. Your customer will not lose money being late for important meeting because the planner did not switch for daylight saving time. And we can continue giving such examples for hours…
Second, a reliable software product should not affect the workflow by its errors bringing a user not only out of ‘flow’, but out of patience. A usual customer will find a way to replace unstable solution with a better product from your competitors or will send tons of angry messages to your technical support and social networks, which is, probably, even worse.
And the first thing, reliable software will never bring “unexpected news”. Working with a product I must be sure (or at least I want this very much) that I can count with the product not only now, but in the future. I must be sure that a product will not be unexpectedly discontinued and a vendor will not disappear in the white smoke leaving tons of open tickets in the bug tracking system.
In relation to a software product, the “reliability” word can be considered as tolerance and ability to keep stable work independently from external factors. Of course, such force major conditions as lightning or meteorite fall can be excluded from the point of view of this article, but even these factors must be taken into account in some critical systems. Thus, reliability can be considered as a variable reciprocal to the quantity of appeared risks.
And of course, a reliable product will never send your confidential information to unknown recipients or use your computer as a botnet spot.
