Can EnvisionConnect sustain a near-zero defect count?

Like Kevin, the day before, CTO Darryl Booth was preparing for the 2007 EnvisionConnect User Training and Conference, when I bopped into his office.

"I'm glad you stopped by, HL. There must be some sort of mix-up. Kevin says you told him that your team is close to rendering EnvisionConnect defect-free—and that the product may never again have more than a dozen defects at any given time."

"Uh-huh."

"Now, I know that Scrum, integrated testing, traceability, and the concepts of truth, trust, and transparency can enable agile teams to deliver new features with little or no known defects—and I know that this month, your team made a concentrated effort to close all defects and to move any issues that are actually projects to the product backlog for prioritization by the product owner—but do you really think your team will be able to sustain a near-zero defect count in EnvisionConnect?"

"Uh-huh."

"And you actually believe that we should tell customers this at the conference?"

"Uh-huh."

"It might interest you to know that Microsoft has not discussed defects at any of it's user conferences since Windows 2000 was released—seven years ago. The press beat them up, because they announced that the product had been released with 65,000 defects—and this was Microsoft. They have one tester for every three developers—30,000 Quality Assurance engineers testing full-time—and their flagship product still had defects. Do you really think Decade Software can accomplish what Microsoft could not?"

"Uh-huh."

"Oh—I know what you're thinking: Two year's ago Microsoft adopted Scrum—and Windows Vista and the new Microsoft Office are almost bug-free—so really we've made the same quality improvements while using the same technologies as Microsoft, and—since EnvisionConnect should be easier to maintain than a full operating system—delivering our product with near-zero defects shouldn't be that difficult. Is that what you were thinking, HL?"

"Uh-huh."

"Hey... You're not going to put all of this in your blog, are you?"

"Uh-huh."