Social Glass

I was talking with a colleague the other day about a major project that had been deployed to Production a few months ago for one of his clients. The solution is a “standard” J2EE application” (EJBs, JMS, Struts, JBoss etc.) and is used both behind the firewall for CSRs and on the internet for online order handling. While it is stable, there are a few quirks/bugs with the online component. Some of these bugs are discovered by testers, but interestingly the majority are discovered by “an industry community” which details them on a forum.

My colleague said the feedback they get from this forum is invaluable and has lead to many incremental system improvements. And best of all nobody has to pay an army of testers to find these holes in the system.

Talk about leveraging the longtail for business benefit.