Quality - The Team and the Details

Quality is a term everyone uses. Everybody thinks it's important. And of course, everybody wants it.

But what is quality exactly? Look it up on wikipedia and you'll quickly see it refers to some very different concepts.

On top of that, our own particular context and personality go a long way in determining how we evaluate quality.

For software, I see quality as the result of really, really hard work. To me, it requires skilled individuals that consistently perform at their utter best, while maintaining an attentive eye for detail. For most concepts I've come across, details are key in determining overall quality.

So... Do you have clean code? Do you have adequate unit-test coverage? Do you perform functional testing regularly? Do you pass your tests? How quickly can you deploy a bug-fix to production? Is your software delivered on schedule? Is your product backlog acceptable in size? Is the number of required quick fixes reasonable?...

I know... It's a lot of balls to keep in the air all at once! But for a development team to output quality on a consistent basis, you need everybody's skills, their attention to detail and their absolute dedication. We like to refer to these as software craftsmanship.

I consider myself very lucky to be part of a team that makes this all look easy...