Notes on Software Quality
anthonyhobday.com
Notes on Software Quality
1–10 of 82 posts
Re: Notes on Software Quality
#2> Some people don’t care enough
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> The more people you hire, the more likely you are to hire people who don’t care enough about good interface design. Good interface design needs to be valued by everyone who can affect the work. That includes developers, designers, product managers, and often the CEO.
I know where you're going with this, but here's a twist:
A CEO who cares about interface _design_ is path to micromanaging and pain. A CEO should care about interface _designers_, who are (hopefully) the people trained on how do it well.
Even better: CEOs should care about developers with UI/UX skills, because too often CEOs adopt designers like a pet and keep them busy 24/7 asking for mockups.
Re: Notes on Software Quality
#3> Some people don’t care enough > > The more people you hire, the more likely you are to hire people who don’t care enough about good interface design. Good interface design needs to be valued by everyone who can affect the work. That includes developers, designers, product managers, and often the CEO. I know where you're going with this, but here's a twist: A CEO who cares about interface _design_ is path to microma…
My assumption when reading that the CEO should care, was that they give those underneath them the time and resources needed to achieve quality because they value it, not that they are necessarily involved in the details.
Re: Notes on Software Quality
#4Right off the bat, I disagree with the assertion that software quality is merely a concept of how it functions now. In reality software is a living thing and quality is so much more than whether there is a glaring issue right now.
Re: Notes on Software Quality
#5(Anthony has some great paper solo role playing games on his blog too)
Re: Notes on Software Quality
#6Corporate megasoftware suffers from the same structural problems as ancient megafauna; when there is a fixed amount of material to build the organism, it's almost always more efficient to split it into smaller, more coherent, repeatable bodies that project power through coordination, rather than a single large body that imposes its will on the world via sheer weight and size. The bottleneck was, as in the now-extinct branch of evolution, the viability of intelligence in smaller entities; that is now a solved problem. Now we are headed to an Anthropocene of cyberspace, where software is primarily a personal artefact, with optional collaboration, rather than a product designed and distributed from centralized organizations.
Re: Notes on Software Quality
#7Keep in mind that there are people for whom thinking about quality has been their whole career, for decades. There've been long-running industry studies on software quality that have gathered metrics across thousands of businesses on what works and what doesn't. People have been focusing on quality in businesses in general for centuries. It's not a solved problem, but it has been tackled by experts for a long time. It's a good idea to look to their work first before taking a swing at it yourself.
Personally I find quality to have a fundamental impact on everything every human does. It affects mental state, motivation, affects ability, necessity, and time to do things, creates or reduces costs, availability of resources, clarifies or complicates, makes life easier or harder, etc. It can save or destroy a business, make someone's life feel easy as pie or insanely frustrating. But it's not always easy to do right; you need a system to apply quality intelligently or you risk your efforts being wasted (https://global.toyota/en/company/vision-and-philosophy/produ...).
Re: Notes on Software Quality
#8> Some people don’t care enough > > The more people you hire, the more likely you are to hire people who don’t care enough about good interface design. Good interface design needs to be valued by everyone who can affect the work. That includes developers, designers, product managers, and often the CEO. I know where you're going with this, but here's a twist: A CEO who cares about interface _design_ is path to microma…
A CEO should know when the people working for them are bullshitting them, blowing smoke...
Re: Notes on Software Quality
#9> Beliefs about quality I want to disprove... (lists 38 bullets)
Sure you didn't miss one? You can't have an exhaustive list because any of those can be just as true as false depending on the situation.
Instead of picking the ones I disagree with most, I'll just say that low quality is miscommunication. The bugs are a snapshot of the organization.
There are multiple facets to hang concern on that the other stakeholders don't know about or ignore. Your ability to discuss them, plan, and execute is the bottleneck. Everyone has to be on the same page.
This cannot be the sole responsibility of the devs or small isolated teams. Scale is necessary for quality to emerge.
Re: Notes on Software Quality
#10I assume this is written by a UI designer or something, and it certainly feels like "notes" and not a cohesive article. Claiming "The six signals of quality in software" and then listing only user-facing concerns and including subjective items like "Beauty: Is the software as aesthetically pleasing as possible?" is questionable.
I'm interested in quality, but I didn't find these notes enlightening, and couldn't even finish the article.