Testing and breaking your rules (before somebody else does)
If you are like me, it’s always a relief to get a spreadsheet, program, or decision model working. And sometimes, we’re reluctant to push our new creation too hard in case it breaks. But whether we look for errors or not, any hidden errors are still there and will come back to bite us later
Even worse, errors get more expensive to fix the longer you ignore them. What is trivial to change now (while the model is fresh in your mind) could take you several hours to track down in a couple of months (when you have worked on several other projects in the meantime). And it could get very expensive if the problem is seen by real customers or end users– we could end up giving away a lot of free chocolate and hurt the reputation of our business.
Even more depressing is that fixing this error could cause other things to break. For example, we might update our bill of materials, and then find out that another...
