Is testing for girly-CIOs?
Interesting discussion caused by an article in the WSJ about the decision of ASU's chief technology officer to forgo full testing in an ERP implementation. How did he do that? Well, he just took a page book out of all the Web 2.0 startups and released the software in beta (That's a polite way of saying the product/service is not fully finished/tested.).
So who tests the application? Well, the poor users of course. And this is what has caused a firestorm. There have been cases of employees not getting paid, or in some cases overpaid. The CTO's justification for not fully testing? He's apparently managed to save over half the original $70m estimated price tag and reduced the time taken to bring the application to its users. Very impressive. But is this a strategy that other CIOs should follow?
