Ask HN: Why is software quality an afterthought for many people/companies?

If you have mistaken issues of style for issues of quality, than that might seem to be the case. True quality in software is measurable primarily in the defect rate, and secondarily in the amount of effort needed to enhance it.

> Theoretically, you could write software by just having an incredibly long list of test cases and a random string generator.

Putting aside the time and concurrency issues, the quality would be determined by the correctness and thoroughness of your test cases.

But one of the benefits of a rewrite is that you can dump all the features and edge-cases that are no longer required. Or fold old edge-cases into new generalities because the business has changed since then.

> the real world is messy, very messy.

Cannot disagree -but- it's nowhere near as messy as the people (often those who are to blame) defending the byzantine software stacks using that argument.

> reality is going to temper their enthusiasm after a decade or so.

I've been doing this professionally for two decades and my enthusiasm for "chuck it away and do it right" hasn't waned one bit.

You will probably appreciate this little piece of anecdata, last July there was an update change in some fiscal Laws in Italy, so that a number of firms had to make a certain payment of taxes within the 31st of July, BUT the change was communicated/published almost "last minute" (as often happens) and a software house had to update their accounting program in a very strict time. The payment code (on the government side) was the same of another payment (already known to be due on the 31/07/2017) so the programmers, in order to distinguish the two payments "anticipated" (virtually) the date on the database, so that two payments were resulting, one on the 30th and one on 31st.

This (intentionally) "queer" behaviour was not explained (or not explained well enough) to the users.

Most users "trusted" the program and everything went well for them, those that noticed the anomaly managed to "force" both payments on the same date, and this resulted in a "single" payment (instead of the two separate ones required), thus messing up the whole thing.

Quality in general has always been an afterthought by many if not most people and companies. Always will be.

Some people are just not quality people. But when they find their way into important corporate positions their "leadership" effectively puts a major obstacle in front of any inherently higher-quality operators or teams underneath, restricting the flow of true available quality towards the clients, customers, and shareholders that could otherwise benefit.

Probably why I named my first company Quality, just like so many other companies in so many fields of operation, because it's not an afterthought to me.

Combined, all us "Quality" oriented companies who try to choose this as a differentiator still make up a small minority and are always under continuous pressure to compromise this most elusive feature, sometimes necessary to compete or even survive in situations where higher quality is not fully valued. More often there is downward pressure when lower quality becomes overvalued, as we see this trend growing in the 21st century.

It's tough for so many people to tell the difference between low and high quality anyway, especially for those where it's not even an afterthought.