Forget Time-to-Market: It’s All About Time-to-Money

By Susan Kunz

August 15, 2006 —

The popular business school metric time-to-market (TTM) is of little value to software development projects. And, even worse, it consistently offers incentives for counterproductive economic behavior. The problem is that time-to-market measures the ability of an organization to get a new product out the door whether or not that product will be successful in the marketplace.

A better way to measure performance would be to focus product efforts on time-to-money (TT$), defined as the time it takes to deliver a product into the marketplace and achieve sustainable positive economic returns to its maker.

We’ve all participated in meetings where delivering a software product to meet a time-to-market goal was the metric tied to bonuses. Software developers know that any software train can arrive on time, if you don’t care how many cars it has and if what were supposed to be Pullman sleepers turn out to be boxcars with faulty air brakes.

Users are smart. They keenly feel disappointment when software doesn’t do what marketers promised, or behaves in unexpected and even dangerous ways. They tell their friends and clients. The sales pipeline dries up. And increasingly, wronged customers share their woes with product liability lawyers.

Billions in Waste
Based on reports from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Sustainable Computing Consortium, the total cost of software defects will reach an estimated US$300 billion this year. This compares with an overall software investment of around $600 billion. So, half of every dollar spent on software goes down the tubes as cost-of-defects.

But what if software development teams had to meet a different goal: time-to-money? Consider how the incentive structure would change if software teams were chartered to reduce the time between when product development begins and when products start to generate positive cash flow?

Products designed to shorten time-to-money would arrive to market with clearly differentiated features and benefits. They would delight customers and impress influencers. The product makers would face lower field support and return costs, and software suppliers would avoid the embarrassing, negative impact of poor quality on reputation and brand.

There’s no doubt that a TT$ incentive structure would change software development practices. The current road to quality involves tedious, labor-intensive testing that has become synonymous with delay and expense. This is largely because software quality assurance is a back-ended process that involves torture-testing already-written code by trying it out in a variety of use cases until time runs out, and the product finally must ship.

Use cases range from the basic—“If I do what I’m supposed to, do I get expected results?”—to the exotic—“What happens to my application if I expose it to excessive cosmic rays?” (The author speaks from personal experience when it comes to cosmic ray testing.) In any event, the testers can’t think of everything even if they had the time, and when it’s all over, customers are expected to play their traditional role in completing the QA process.

A Better Way
Now if this were the process used in automotive or structural design, we’d have a lot more highway fatalities and structures collapsing. But these engineering disciplines have analytical tools that help them identify integrity issues before a car rolls onto the test track or a crew starts bulldozing for foundations. Electronic design automation for semiconductors provides an instructive example of how industrial-strength tools enable virtual design across teams with hundreds of developers placing and routing hundreds of millions of transistors onto substrates the size of a thumbnail. And these immensely complex products generally successfully announce “hello world” when first connected to power and signal sources.

These effective tools exist because of the economics associated with post-shipment quality issues for semiconductors. Time-to-money is severely impacted by defects, and since profitability is front-ended, delayed ramp to volume (caused by defective parts) can erase profit margins. Ironically, all of the heavy-duty engineering tools available to mechanical, electrical and structural engineers are written in software. Conversely, software developers are the cobbler’s children who have no shoes.

But, can we really afford the cost of post-shipment software defects any longer? With today’s applications numbering in the hundreds of thousands or millions of lines of code (and doubling every three years), and with defect densities ranging from one to 50 defects per 1,000 lines of code, we are sitting on a time bomb that ticks at a gigahertz pace.

So, after 45 years of Moore’s Law, if CPU cycles are all but free, where are the engineering tools to help developers create better software?

Tools to use
2004 and 2005 marked the first years of more widespread adoption of software structural analysis tools. Although light on engineering, these tools at least deal with basic hygiene issues, and can provide some level of assurance that coders aren’t taking too many liberties and/or haven’t succumbed to the management-prescribed “do more with less, but worse” practice that has characterized the post dot-com era.

But, these structural analysis tools alone won’t guarantee software integrity. The industry needs analytical, engineering tools rooted in science and math (as opposed to process) that take advantage of plentiful, unused CPU cycles to assess software integrity across the development life cycle to deliver a continuous readiness assessment. Only a new generation of engineering tools can give development teams a fighting chance to deliver quality products. Software quality and time-to-money cannot improve significantly without them.

Time-to-money matters. In fact in most business, it’s the leading indicator for success or failure. Borrowing what works from other advanced engineering disciplines would serve the software industry well. Beyond the technology, it has the potential to make each one of our daily lives better with respect to wealth, health and happiness. What’s not to like?

Susan Kunz is president and co-founder of Solidware Technologies; before that, she worked at Sun Microsystems.

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