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by alok-g
3168 days ago
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>> piece of software that mostly does what the customers want even if it is low-quality The state of the software is currently much worse in my opinion. Quality is not easily quantified while the price is. Metrics at the customer end are hard to collect (it requires software development too, raising the costs), and in the current state of the art, it also requires having customer support staff too which is still costlier. As a result, quality does not even gets quantified properly. A natural result of which is quality reducing below what would customers desire. This isn't much different than where quality of MP3 players, laptops and smartphones was headed. Perhaps quality then was being measured just by percentage of customer returns, not by customer satisfaction. Steve Jobs then changed the game. Apple's products would just "feel right" to the customers. Apple iPod took over the market even after being much costlier. It then took a couple years for the rest of the laptop/smartphone manufacturers to catch up. |
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"Feel right" is definitely a kind of quality that software can compete on. I'd probably put Chrome in this category (relative to other browsers that were around at the time it launched). Sublime Text, maybe. Blizzard games (especially those of a certain era).
Note, though, that this quality is principally about doing what the users want and being pleasant to use while doing so.
It's something that you can definitely focus on deliberately in your work and projects, but I'd argue that a lot of the current mantras that get recited when software quality comes up (test coverage, continuous delivery, maybe even code reviews) are not especially helpful for achieving this kind of user-perceived quality. Maybe even a distraction, in some cases. Getting your code in front of users and listening to feedback can help, certainly. But having a strong, clear, vision of what you're trying to build in the first place might be even more important. And I don't think that's something that's achieved with tools and processes.