I am the main business stakeholder for an email delivery system built in-house. (We are an agency and this web-based application is one of our top software tools, used globally.) The development went smoothly and since launching 6 weeks ago, the users are generally happy. However… I would rate software reliability as a 6 out of 10. About 5-7 bugs are reported per week that cause a user’s email campaign to come to a halt — we lose data on that campaign, and the user has to spend days recovering the error and even explaining to our clients why something has gone wrong.
We’ve had several conversations with the development team about this; they have put in several solutions such as monitoring alerts. The challenge is, we are a small company so the dev team is stretched. There is no documentation on the system and the main developer on it is only several months old in the company so doesn’t understand our business, and is less experienced than the other developers (who have been around for years). I bring up the point on experience because everytime we report a problem, a senior developer takes 2 seconds to figure out the problem. But by that time, it’s too late — the users have lost a lot of time and their confidence in the software’s reliability is getting chipped away.
I would appreciate any advice on how to bring up our software’s reliability. Thanks.