What do we mean by software quality?

As tech consultants, we speak a lot about about software ‘quality’. But what does this mean? How can you determine ‘quality’? And does it differ between organisations and teams?

Here’s what Ten10’s expert panel had to say:

Emma Hargreaves

I guess [when it comes to] quality in my role, I honestly don’t really have an opinion about it. Which sounds strange because I work in quality all day, every day. I’m a tester but I’m also a consultant working on different projects. Every project is different. Every project’s priorities are different. What quality means to one person or one stakeholder is completely different to what it means to another. So I don’t really have a definition, but what my role is as a tester is to understand what people’s definitions of quality are and help them to understand where the solution is in terms of their benchmark on that quality. So I can’t define what quality is, but once somebody tells me, I can help them to realise where things are at right now.

Mala Benn

I would say that quality is a measure of the degree to which customers expectations are met in a service or an application that you’re building. There are lots of dimensions to it and there could be expectations on different levels. It could be, for example, the usability of an application or the maintainability, how secure it is, how performant. Those are actually what you define through conversations with your users or your stakeholders or the requesters of the application. I agree with you, Emma, it’s all about what you decide as a team or someone who’s building it as to what quality will mean to you.

Robbie Falck

I’ve always worked for B2C companies and for the past five or so years I’ve worked for app-based companies. It’s very much similar to what you said – happy customers. But I tend to not think about it with a QA hat on. I just think about ‘would I actually use this product? Would I get information that I need?’ I guess specifically to Moneybox, we try to educate people on a better savings and wealth journey so it’s really important that we have products that people actually understand. And if they’re going to give us our money, we need to know what’s going on and make sure that they feel comfortable, and we’re the right person to do that.

I definitely think about it in that way. I also think about in terms of our QA team and internally. The thing that comes to mind is risk management, but also more collaboration. If I think about the projects that have gone really badly, it’s usually because as the QA team, we haven’t collaborated and we haven’t spoken enough about the risks and been there for the delivery and seen it through, and gone left and right in all different directions. So the projects that end up being really great are the ones that we’ve collaborated very well on.

Vernon Richards

There’s a chap called Jerry Weinberg who has a definition of quality that I like which is “Quality is value to some person.” I really like that definition because it always keeps at the front of my mind ‘who are you talking about, exactly, and what do they care about?’ Because weren’t not just one homogeneous group of people. We all have different things that we care about [and] we think are important. When it comes to the workplace, the thing that I like to bring up is, as a business, what problem are you trying to solve and for who? Because that will guide everything that you do within your teams and the business. Whenever I see the divergence from those things, that’s when I start to get a little bit more vocal. from little bit more vocal.

Stuart Day

What I’m hearing from the panel is quality is a subjective thing. It will mean something different about value to somebody at different times. And that can change as well. One minute, you can be using your phone for one thing, and then you think ‘actually, I think this other feature will be really useful. Maybe I need to get a different one.’ Your priorities and your value and everything changes. So it is very much subjective. It is trying to understand ‘who are your customers?’ But also there’s layers to that. It’s not just the end product that is shipped out, but how you’re working, the quality, the communication to enable you to do those things. It’s not just the quality of the output. It’s all the pieces that take you to that point that ultimately help you achieve that.