[dead]
Notes on Software Quality
51–60 of 82 posts
Re: Notes on Software Quality
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're circling the definition I most closely align with which was coined by Gerald Weinberg - "Quality is value to some person". You can have the best looking interface and the cleanest codebase, but if nobody is getting value from your software, who cares? If somebody is getting a ton of value from your software they're more forgiving of defects they run into. There isn't some intrinsic value to software, i…
I'm not sure about that definition. If your software solves a problem that many users face, that makes it useful and, presumably, valuable, but it doesn't mean it's of higher quality than niche software of relatively little use.
[deleted]
Re: Notes on Software Quality
#53Isn't high quality defined by how easy it is to maintain as the scale grows? I feel there is a disconnect between the "quality as perceived by developers" and the "quality as experienced by designers and users."
Re: Notes on Software Quality
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're circling the definition I most closely align with which was coined by Gerald Weinberg - "Quality is value to some person". You can have the best looking interface and the cleanest codebase, but if nobody is getting value from your software, who cares? If somebody is getting a ton of value from your software they're more forgiving of defects they run into. There isn't some intrinsic value to software, i…
I'm not sure about that definition. If your software solves a problem that many users face, that makes it useful and, presumably, valuable, but it doesn't mean it's of higher quality than niche software of relatively little use.
OP didn’t say “little-used” software, they said “nobody,” and I think this was meant to be taken literally in this context. Software that has 0 users is of no use to anyone by definition.
Re: Notes on Software Quality
#55[flagged]
Re: Notes on Software Quality
#56I 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…
Yeah, when a software focuses on beauty I only have to wonder what they sacrificed to achieve it.
They hid all 300 functions inside a single hamburger menu, to avoid clutter on my 27 inches screen.
Re: Notes on Software Quality
#57Quality is the extent to which the end product meets expectations. Also, quality attributes are well-defined in the ISO 25010 standard so I'd stick to those rather than imagining some for myself.
Re: Notes on Software Quality
#58If thorough testing and 100 experts can’t find a problem, the thing is probably perfect. If you can get 100 experts to agree on something then you've cracked a much harder problem than software quality.
Take curl, it has had many more than 100 experts going through it over the years, and yet with new tooling (AI) they located a bunch of other issues. Perfection in software does not exist, but that's fine as long as you're aware.
(in the case of curl, any security issues inside the library should be mitigated by its environment)
Re: Notes on Software Quality
#59Quality is the ratio of the value you derive from the software to the cost to you of using it.
Most typical quality attributes can be subsumed under this schema.
If the software costs too much to change because the architecture is poor, that reduces the quality.
If the interface is poor or it is slow unnecessarily, it costs you more time to use it, and that reduces its value to you and hence its quality.
If the software is insecure, you may actually lose privacy or even money using it.
If the software is not robust, you run the risk of losing data and time, etc. when using it
Re: Notes on Software Quality
#60If thorough testing and 100 experts can’t find a problem, the thing is probably perfect. If you can get 100 experts to agree on something then you've cracked a much harder problem than software quality.
Agreed. We cant even get 10 dentists to agree which toothpaste to use. Getting 100 experts to agree on anything is a miracle.
Because different toothpaste is helpful for different cases and reasons?