Why is software not getting better?

People have complained for years about buggy software. To be honest I think the internet and the ability to update software quickly is partly to blame. When I first started my career in software engineering, part of my job was to create releases. This involved putting together installers for new versions and burning them onto CDs ready to be sent out to customers. There was no download mechanism to get updates for the software. The software had to be bug free first time round. The company also produced software for other companies mostly in embedded devices which were hard to update. To get to this level of quality, we were required to use things like cyclomatic complexity and other static analysis tools as well as MCDC unit tests. Which apart from regulated industries like aviation and military, no one bothers doing any more. If you shipped software with a critical bug in it, then you ended up with a lot of unhappy customers that had to wait weeks to get the fixed version. Move Fast…