Test-early, test-often

The recent news on instances of iPhone 3GS oveheating and even exploding brings an opportunity to revisit the importance of testing early and testing often. Every software and hardware technologies have aspects that are hard to test and it is not uncommon for a new product to have flaws that need to be fixed shortly after release to market. One reason for it is that the market itself is the best test environment possible. Most problems encountered have to do with either scalability, use flow, or extended usage. The second and third kind can be minimized if the product is used for as long as possible and played with at all times. A very important factor to increase the efficacy of this test-early test-often strategy is to make sure that feature prioritization takes into account risk-value factor. What this means is that the features that add more value and are of higher risk should be developed first so that the level of risk decreases over time thanks to intensive and extensive testing.