An eBay software engineer said the company rolls out hundreds of releases a month. Lakshimi Duraivenkatesh, Vice President of Buyer Experience Engineering at eBay, made the revelation in a blog post on Monday.
Duraivenkatesh wrote the post to explain how software product quality goes well beyond simply avoiding bugs at eBay.
“Given that the customer experience is a cohesive end-to-end journey, with each journey possibly split into multiple different possible scenarios, there is a possibility of a kink in the chain.” But, she said, “we are not always talking about bugs. A suboptimal customer journey is also considered a break in quality from a product perspective.”
She said the general tendency across most organizations was to focus on testing at the end of the software development life cycle (SDLC), but eBay looks at a release with a holistic perspective.
“eBay is consistently at the forefront of quality in execution and delivery. To take quality to the next level, we looked at the whole lifecycle of software development and identified key factors that typically have a cascading effect,” she said.
The result of eBay’s approach to quality resulted in a 25% increase in release volume, and an across-the-board 79% reduction in overall bugs.
Unfortunately she did not provide information about the nature of these software releases. For those who are technology-minded, you can find Duraivenkatesh’s post on the eBay Inc. Tech blog.
Greedbay is always in the forefront of quality and execution = sinking ship
what a bunch of nonsense.
So basically instead of testing out a release right before it’s ready to be rolled out – they started testing out the release at each stage during their development. The result is a final better product that comes back with fewer bugs. Wonderful news – hopefully less glitches in the future..hope they don’t patent it and sell it to some other company!!
Except that the correct way to test software is to test it in a “sandbox” and NOT test it live (since you dont know the cascading effects the changes “you made”).
As well (of course) using your sellers as unwitting beta testers is a sleazy move. Not only isnt it a nice thing to do – but live changes done “at will” can drive people crazy for no reason. Features that change or disappear or reappear can play havoc with people.
Dont sellers deserve the right to be paid for being beta testers? Shouldnt you tell them?
Typical eBay disdain for its sellers.