Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Knol - Software - Technical Bugs and Nonfunctioning Features - Managerial Neglect


Roger Pressman, the most popular author of the book, Software Engineering in his preface talks of software that works without problems and ease of use for a long period of time as the objective of software engineering.

Knol is an internet  product of Google and all will expect a software that functions in excellent manner. But contrary to expectations, this product failed many number of times during its active life and now its last phase also it is not working properly. Authors have expressed anguish many times about its shortcomings. The managerial response is silence. The managers rarely acknowledged the problem and assured the authors the problem is being looked into. The correction was done at some point in time. But with each correction, some or other feature stopped working.

Today (7.3.2012), as a Knol author I received a mail from Knol Help/Google. It talks of using "My Knols" features and redirect feature. "My Knols" stopped working from 25th December 2011. Redirect feature does not accept links any more for the last 10 days or so. Authors are complaining. Have the managers acknowledged the problem?  No. They have not acknowledged. The managerial neglect has to be experienced to be believed.

Google has closed number of products recently. I feel many of them must have suffered from similar technology bugs and managerial neglect.

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