The 'Soviet Shoe Factory Principle': Setting clear goals leads to losing sight of the true purpose
WikiWikiWeb, 'the world's first wiki,' presents the story of a shoe factory in the former Soviet Union as an example of how setting easily visible goals too easily could have led to unrealistic results.
Soviet Shoe Factory Principle
According to the WikiWikiWeb article 'Principles of the Soviet Shoe Factory,' Soviet shoe factories had production quotas and were under pressure to increase production, but the factories suffered from chronic shortages of materials.
So the factory increased production of children's shoes, which require fewer materials. As a result, while the factory met its production quota on paper, it is said to have experienced a severe shortage of adult shoes, especially larger sizes.
Even if size restrictions are imposed to prevent only children's shoes from being made, it is easy to imagine that quality will be sacrificed, such as by reducing the amount of thread used to sew the materials together. If authorities also set standards for the amount of thread used, then old thread may be used, and if restrictions are imposed on the quality of the thread, then cheap leather and inferior adhesives may be used.
The following cases are presented as examples of similar problems seen in modern software development:
- Beautiful looking documents, despite being of questionable fundamental quality. This is especially common in documents, especially auto-generated documents and web pages.
- Although the product has all the functions stated in the specifications, the user interface is difficult to use, but the vendor claims, 'This product has all the functions you need, so please choose us.'
The details of the software used by higher-level managers receive more attention than the details of the software used by lower-level employees.
The code is developed with every design pattern and coding best practice known to top practitioners in the field, and is heavily and automatically documented, yet it cannot handle the business-level use cases that customers expect, and there are visible errors due to simple spelling mistakes made by the user.
- Excessive reliance on
- Project managers are reprimanded for honestly reporting missed project milestones, leading to the setting of vague milestones and goals that can be achieved in a few weeks.
WikiWikiWeb states the moral of the story: 'The factors that are easiest to measure or most visible get the most attention, regardless of their relative importance to other factors. In other words, people tend to forget that just because something is the easiest to measure or model doesn't mean it's the most important factor or the best indicator of the situation.'
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in Software, Posted by log1l_ks