What Is Quality?

Quality is one of the greatest things in life, but it’s ephemeral and hard to define. In a similar way to how “acts of love” make better people, quality functions make better products.

In my previous post, I spoke about The Forgotten First Principle of Software Delivery: Quality. I promised to explain more about how to measure and define Quality, but to do so, we need to also consider Value, because there is an intrinsic relationship between Quality, Value and… Love! Allow me to explain.

Quality Is Like Love

When you love someone or something, you invest your time and energy to express that love. You care about their wellbeing and their condition. When applied throughout a child’s life, the love manifests itself in the child being balanced and secure. For a car to be admired as a “classic” 70 years after it leaves the factory, it needs to have had love applied throughout its life, from the designer to the owner.

Quality is exactly the same. When due care and attention is applied throughout, the quality of the resulting outcomes can be both measured in tangible ways, and felt in emotional ways.

High quality comes from care and attention.

Applying Quality To Value

Let’s look at how this works in product development. Consider the following coarse-grained stages of value creation:

A modified version of the Design Squiggle

Value creation always begins as an idea that you realize through an iterative series of steps. At every single stage in this process, you are assuming that your idea and its implementation are valuable. This is assumed value. When a consumer receives value from your realized idea, then and only then, is your idea truly valuable. This is when assumed value becomes real value.

Quality Functions

The way in which assumed value is transformed into real value is through quality functions. I briefly introduced the idea of quality functions in my previous post and said that “quality functions are the methods and practices that are essential for the continued delivery of value.” Perhaps a simpler way of thinking about them is that:

Quality Functions are acts of love, care and attention that you apply throughout a product’s life.

They are the means by which you adapt the idea and its implementation to increase quality.

Putting Quality Functions Into Practice

I like to use extreme examples when trying to prove a concept or theory. Consider these two extremes: