Progress v2: Is the Pareto Principle the worst enemy of Progress?

[This is my second article on Progress. The first article is here. Keep tuned in for more. It is coming. Really!]

As we've seen in my last post, perfectionism doesn't do well in the face of the rapid progress of the current software-internet-turbo-world. So how does the industry ever finish any projects?

The short answer is, by using an interpretation of the 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto Principle.

The used interpretation differs from one company to the other. Unfortunately, in the software industry (spell m-i-c-... etc) the interpretation in question is, "You can achieve 80% of the intended result by investing 20% of effort".
The corollary of that interpretation is, to achieve the remaining 20% of the intended result, you need to invest the other 80% of effort. And business don't play that.

Which often enough results in released products ~80-90% ready, because it simply doesn't pay off to invest more effort to make the product "more ready".

Since later software almost always relies on previously created software-libraries, or tries to stay compatible (often even bug-compatible) to already existing software, the application of the 80/20 rule results in "progress" being made at the cost of quality, and also, the bugs of every product built on top of an existing buggy product compound, the end product becoming progressively worse. (The same is also true for other forms of modular technology, e.g. computer hardware.)

Also, unfortunately, the final 80% of the effort in the "traditional" software development methodology (as opposed to the agile software development) is debugging, which also explains the quality of some software products out there.

With this in mind, the Pareto principle can be easily converted into a weaker form of Sturgeon's Law - at least 80% of everything we produce in the name of Progress is crap.


But then, if nothing is ever perfect, it is easier to sell something new by claiming that it is better. And that's why, next time, we'll see how the sales department deals with the notion of progress.