The rosy picture often painted of our world transformed by high tech successes belies a denial of serious problems with quality. Michael Tiemann argues something must be done, and soon, since much of our current software functions poorly, and the cost of IT to business is far too high. Open source can help break this jam by designing and building quality into products and processes. An essential step is the recognition that the design problem, and its solution, belong to everyone. Barriers to cooperation must be broken down so that many small actions across teams can build quality from the ground up, and lift software out of its shabby state.

To illustrate his argument, Tiemann explores the 14 points which W. Edwards Deming famously gave in his advice to help revitalize the Japanese manufacturing industry (after being ignored by the Americans) in the 20th century. Deming emphasized the need to design enablers that produce quality output as a by-product. Most importantly, Deming saw the transformation to quality as everybody's job. In the context of software, 'everybody' means all players including open source developers and the big proprietary vendors such as Microsoft. A deep understanding of design is the best way to ensure quality implementation that anticipates and circumvents problems, rather than struggling later to remediate the consequences of poor design.

Tiemann also draws on the comparison of installation-based and path-based strategies. In early days, IT was organized around implementing a few big, high stakes projects. That approach has become cumbersome because large scale projects only give value once they're finally complete. This no longer suffices in today's world where business needs delivery of value from many small projects on a day-to-day basis. Open Source examples such as extensive fuzz testing and bug fixing in Linux show how a path-based approach which relies on the accumulated benefit of many actions by many people can solve problems in ways which would be unattainable by an individual, and resistant to conventional approaches such as simply throwing money around.