What is quality?

After four and a half hours sitting in a meeting about software processes, everyone has a different opinion of what "quality" means.

Some of the perspectives:

• Maintainable code
• Free of bugs
• No customer complaints
• Meets functional specs
• Appeases the project financier
• Fully tested
• Full test coverage
• Doesn't suck

All valid points.  All worth considering.  Where do you start?  At the project beginning?  Is the end really too late?  Is it the responsibility of the coders?  The project manager? The testers?  Me (the quality manager)?

The only answer I can feel comfortable with is, Yes.  Start at all of them, and everyone is responsible.

Now how do you quantize this, when there are so many smart people who have very strong cases against measuring quality metrics?  How do you get management buy-in?

No answers yet, but I am looking hard!

2008!

Okay, so it appears that blogging is a once-a-year activity for me right now, but maybe 2008 will be a bit different. Last time I had no sense of direction, and that probably stalled me - I had no motivation to write anything when the topic area was so open. Following the lead of some of the blogs I am currently following, I plan to keep posting regularly on topics that deal with my profession.

Software Engineering... specifically build automation, installer programs, commercialization, SCCM, and any other "Build Master" type engineering.

Here goes...

2007-01-11

Here I go again for my second go at a blog. I don't have a real direction for this blog yet - so if you do happen to stumble upon this, well, sorry! Maybe organic growth will shape into something worth reading on a regular basis.

My first blog was kindly set up by Paul Gvildys a few years ago on my University of Waterloo account, a blog system which he wrote to learn PHP and still uses on his own blog; but I dismantled the site after about a year with only a handful of postings. For some reason I couldn't get into it then... maybe this time it will "click".

What got me started again? Well Jen had to start an edu-blog for teacher's college, and I have been reading Joel on Software, so a combination of the two factors have got me trying this blog thing out again. Reeeeaaally late into the blogging game.