Notes on Software Quality: Why Perfection is Impossible but Essential
I define software quality as the absence of problems, a spectrum where perfection is unreachable yet worth pursuing. Leadership and culture dictate whether an organization can achieve high standards, though quality becomes increasingly difficult as scale grows. While not always necessary for commercial success, prioritizing quality attracts talent, reduces technical debt, and builds a competitive moat that turns users into loyal fans.
High quality is impossible past a certain point of scale. Some organisations are incapable of making high quality software. Importantly, this is a natural result of scale. It's not a complaint or a problem to be solved. It cannot be solved.
- onion2k
If thorough testing and 100 experts can’t find a problem, the thing is probably perfect.
If you can get 100 experts to agree on something then you've cracked a much harder problem than software quality.
- amarant
I disagree with the initial premise
>Quality is the absence of problems
A low quality code base can be problem free if surrounding circumstances are forgiving enough. Conversely, a high quality codebase can have a lot of problems in difficult circumstances.
I haven't thought about it long enough to have a definition of quality that I'm really happy with, but I think a "resilience to hardships" would be a better definition of quality. Hardships can come in many forms, and often you're prepared for some of them but not all. Occasionally you'll be prepared for hardships that never occur. There is something to be said for being resilient against the correct kinds of hardships, which is why I'm not entirely pleased with my definition either.
But absence of problems is not it. That might be entirely circumstantial and is therefore orthogonal to quality.
- manoDev
> Some people don’t care enough
>
> The more people you hire, the more likely you are to hire people who don’t care enough about good interface design. Good interface design needs to be valued by everyone who can affect the work. That includes developers, designers, product managers, and often the CEO.
I know where you're going with this, but here's a twist:
A CEO who cares about interface _design_ is path to micromanaging and pain. A CEO should care about interface _designers_, who are (hopefully) the people trained on how do it well.
Even better: CEOs should care about developers with UI/UX skills, because too often CEOs adopt designers like a pet and keep them busy 24/7 asking for mockups.
- chickensong
I assume this is written by a UI designer or something, and it certainly feels like "notes" and not a cohesive article. Claiming "The six signals of quality in software" and then listing only user-facing concerns and including subjective items like "Beauty: Is the software as aesthetically pleasing as possible?" is questionable.
I'm interested in quality, but I didn't find these notes enlightening, and couldn't even finish the article.
- 0xbadcafebee
Keep in mind that there are people for whom thinking about quality has been their whole career, for decades. There've been long-running industry studies on software quality that have gathered metrics across thousands of businesses on what works and what doesn't. People have been focusing on quality in businesses in general for centuries. It's not a solved problem, but it has been tackled by experts for a long time. It's a good idea to look to their work first before taking a swing at it yourself.
Personally I find quality to have a fundamental impact on everything every human does. It affects mental state, motivation, affects ability, necessity, and time to do things, creates or reduces costs, availability of resources, clarifies or complicates, makes life easier or harder, etc. It can save or destroy a business, make someone's life feel easy as pie or insanely frustrating. But it's not always easy to do right; you need a system to apply quality intelligently or you risk your efforts being wasted (https://global.toyota/en/company/vision-and-philosophy/produ...).