Perceiving Quality
Today I have received a question that was quite interesting, what is the cheapest way to achieve quality. My answer to it was simple: Quality is expensive.
To truly understand that you need to first understand how quality really works.
1st — Quality is a matter of perception.
For example, as a software engineer I understand that Windows is a really good operating system and it does have good quality, therefore, that being said, it doesn’t work for me, so, it’s quality, for me at least, is not good and my choice of operating system is OSX.
In another hand, I have worked under Windows for years and it has one of the best applications ever made, Excel. Doesn’t matter the operating system, Excel is one of the best applications ever built.
With everything that you choose as having good quality or acceptable quality, it will be a matter of opinion or perception. It is how you perceive it having quality that defines how good quality it has.
2nd — To achieve good quality it is necessary culture change.
Steve Jobs had a quote that said: “Don’t sell crap.”. Something so simple that states a level of quality that the audience requires.
As software engineers we construct our applications to have the minimum accepted quality and expect that the quality department takes over and decides that it is good enough. Truth is that this will only bring the base level of quality and a higher level of quality requires a different mindset.
If an engineer performs proper research, then development and adjustments, ensuring higher quality of the product/feature, then, by the time that it reaches the quality department it is already passed the base quality requirement.
It is important to understand that this is a lot more of a mindset/culture change than anything. An engineer that cares about it’s product/feature will ensure by all means that it is good enough to him, first, and then, that it suffices the needs of the audience or the user base.
3rd — Quality is expensive
Stop and think. Everything that you consider having good quality is, in some level, more expensive than another version of it that you believe doesn’t have quality. This goes on tires, cars, clothing, software, computers, etc. As an end user, you pay to have a higher quality of a product.
The reason why you pay to have a higher product quality is because it requires also more time to produce a higher quality product. Regardless if the quality is achieved before product release or after, it will cost to achieve it, and usually, achieving quality after release costs more.
For example, in software, if you have your engineering team properly doing research, development, adjustments and unit tests, and then, having your quality team validating that work, your software will leave to production with quality, but to achieve that it will take X amount of time from the engineering team and then Y amount of time from your quality team.
Doing the same after the fact, costs more because it will take X amount time from the support team, Y amount time from the engineering team and then Z amount of time from the quality team. Now, because the quality was achieved after the release of the product, it requires more teams to achieve the same quality, therefore taking more time and costing more, than originally would have been taken if the quality was achieved before the release of the product.
Finally, a quality product pays back. Having a quality product will save you costs on support time and, when properly priced, will also produce higher profits.
Although portion of this was focused on Software development, truth is, that this can be said in regards several areas and industries, and within some industries, we have ISOs and levels of accepted quality such as 6 sigma.
More importantly is the question, would you use your product? If the answer is yes, then, you got a good quality product.
