Software Quality - Interest of improvement

In previous post I discussed if it's possible to improve the quality and the conclusion was: it is, which is not surprising. I also divided software quality into two groups, functional and none-functional, to make software quality easier to reason about (which it isn't).

In this post  and the next I will discuss what is required to improve the quality and two parts that are necessary are:

• interest of improvement
• knowledge of you current quality

Interest of improvement

Before you can take any actions to improvement, there must exist a interest of improvement. Normally a company wants good quality on it's products so the customer are satisfied and continues to buy/recommend the product. You want:

• the response time of your web browser to be than your competitors, else users will abandon you product.
• to be able to test the product continuously in a reliable way to changes can be made earlier
• the code to be clean and easy to work with, to make it possible to add new feature easier.

But all this will not happened by itself. It’s the people in your company that will make it happened. You need employee's that are like sports people that always seek ways to improvement. So how do you get them? Either you have been lucky with you recruitment or you have a company culture that endorse caring about quality and sharing knowledge. Geoff Schaadt has written an excellent post about How to make your employees care about quality. He writes:
“how do you make your employees care about anything? You can’t make them.”

It means that you can only create a culture that makes people care.

Different people
People are different and have different interest. We want people in our company and teams to be different, because it’s from their discussions innovations are started.
We want different people that are interested to learn more and a company that creates a caring culture.


In the next part I will continue with knowledge of your current quality.