The Mindset

In Quality In The Real World I’ve suggested an abstract formula for practicing quality in your business environment. According to this formula, achieving quality from a business perspective is balancing all the aspects and forces affecting the way you create your products and finding the golden path that will maximize your benefit for the long run.

Does this mean that quality is subjective? Well, I wouldn’t use the term “subjective”. It is, however, context sensitive.

Think about disposable tableware. Would you consider a set of disposable tableware to be of bad quality just because they can’t survive a ride in the dishwasher? Of course not! You don’t expect them to. They are, after all, disposable. I wouldn’t say disposable tableware are of “good enough quality”. They perfectly serve their purpose.

From the product provider’s point of view things are more complicated. The context in which the provider operates has many factors which must be taken into account for him to survive (not to say succeed for the long run). Some of these factors are concerned with the customer, but many others are internal to the provider’s business.

When I write a blog article, I do my best to write it well and without spelling and grammatical mistakes. Hmmm… do I really? To be frank, I can do more. When I write a blog article I don’t go over it ten times. I also don’t send it to a professional editor for copyediting. Why don’t I do these things? Is it because I don’t care about my readers? Of course not! The reason is that I can’t afford it. No one writing a blog can send each posting to a professional copyediting. This is not a reasonable way to use this medium. When I write an article, I do the best I can to do a quality job under the circumstances: the expectations of my readers, the amount of time and money I can invest in this activity, the fact that readers might let me know if they find a noticeable mistake, etc.

When I write a book, on the other hand, I invest much more resources (time and money) in reviews, proofing and editing. Why? The context is different. The readers’ expectations are different; the option to make corrections after publishing is different; and the profit is different. All these circumstances lead me to a different definition of quality in this context. The forces and values that affect the quality equation are different, so the result is different too.

Back to the software world. How should you plan and manage your projects? How much time should you invest in design and how should you approach this task? How many unit tests should you write? What defect rate would you find acceptable? All these questions, and many others, are context sensitive. They depend on the nature of your organization, the expectations of your customers, the nature of the project you are running, the anticipated future of the product, the risks in the project, etc.

The challenge is considering a wide variety of aspects and forces when you try to answer these questions. In most cases, settling for a short-term answer is not a good decision. You must have a vision and a long-term strategy to succeed as a business. This vision will lead you to making the optimal decision – a decision that will produce the best result for the long run.

Unfortunately, many organizations tend to focus on short-term goals and consider only a fraction of the forces that affect the quality of their products. They dismiss every consideration except for time-to-market and more features.

Treating each product and service you provide as if it is disposable tableware or a blog posting cannot possibly be a good strategy. The different context of each project requires a thorough analysis of your goals and the best means to achieve them.