[gnagatomo]

>you can see how a business is being impacted by things that you can see

Strongly agree. The biggest barrier between devs and refactors with zero interface impact is AGILE mentality of always aiming to deliver value to the end user with every deploy. Business people just don't understand how much of an impact crappy implementations and error handling does have on the end user. We see 5~6% error rate, which represents hundreds of thousand of people daily, but shipping a new "feature" (that within months will be used by a few hundred people with a very high bounce rate) is always the top priority.

From time to time there is a meeting with the following subject: "why are users not using the basic features", and the business people's answer is always "the ui is outdated" or "the menu is confusing the user". Those answers are gathered by talking to some random users on the streets close to the company building (I'm not making this up).

[mgkimsal]

> We see 5~6% error rate, which represents hundreds of thousand of people daily, but shipping a new "feature" (that within months will be used by a few hundred people with a very high bounce rate) is always the top priority.

seems to get back to "what gets measured" mantra. And, reminds me cell phone company churn. There's loads of things that could be done to improve service for existing customers, but companies spend budget chasing 'new' customers to 'switch' with low rates for X months, then jack up the price. "Loyal" customers get ignored.

[bobblywobbles]

And then you end up with brittle applications to support. Not fun for devs. Not happy times with management.