Axes of Quality

8thlight.com

2 pointstrptcolin3 comments

What "quality" means with respect to software is something that the experts (Watts Humphrey, SEI, etc) leave up to the imagination, as if "quality" had a single, easy to express meaning. But it doesn't. That's why we need articles like this one. I don't happen to agree entirely with it, as I think that "quality" can have goals in tension with one another, like the "Good/Fast/Cheap, pick any 2" triangle of quality. But overall, a good article.

Yep, fair, "axes" / "dimensions" was overstating - they're not all actually all orthogonal (all models are wrong, some useful, etc.). Mature engineering discussions have plenty of examples of those tensions, e.g. is it more important for this system to be available or consistent?

Again, thanks for the article. The framing was unique in my experience, and the idea that "quality" isn't easily defined or built needs to be hammered on regularly.

You are correct - not every aspect of quality is in tension with some other aspect(s), and mature discussions would include the idea of axes or tension or "pick two" aspects, and the idea that some clusters of aspects go together for very little development effort. But unfortunately, very few seem to acknowledge or believe those things.

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