By: Tracy Kemp
Quality is a broad term; one that is hard to define. Despite its vagueness, quality is surely something you’d recognize when you see it, right? However, like beauty, quality is often in the eye of the beholder. Standards of quality can vary from person to person, depending on their taste, experience, culture and values. As the expression goes: “one man's trash is another man's treasure.”
It’s safe to say delivering high-quality software systems and quality products is a requirement, but the challenge is that there are several different—and valid—points of view about what exactly that means. Is it an on-time and on-budget delivery, a beautiful user interface or a fully automated test suite? Maybe it’s zero bugs in production? Or maybe it’s just that customers aren’t complaining?
The truth is, in software, there is no one simple definition of quality. However, that doesn’t mean, as a software organization, you can’t align on what quality means to all your stakeholders. When developing software, it is essential that your team, company and, most importantly, the people using the software can all unite around one definition of quality. Holding a shared definition of quality is critical to your success if you hope to consistently deliver meaningful products to your customers.
There are a million good reasons why a team may decide to author a definition of quality, but for my team, employee engagement was recently the driving force. As active participants in Gallup’s Q12 employee engagement survey across our global organization, the prompt “My associates or fellow employees are committed to doing quality work” initiated team discussion and exploration around quality.
As a team that considers quality to be a keystone of the products and services we provide, it was difficult to see colleagues struggle with what it meant to produce quality software. Upon further introspection, we realized we could not expect our coworkers to be committed to quality when we couldn’t even explain it to each other. And so, our team’s journey to create a definition of quality began.
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