One of the things that makes it hard to talk about quality software is that we first must overcome the dominating myth about quality, which goes like this: The quality of a product is built into it by its development team. They create quality by following disciplined engineering practices to engineer the source code so that it will fulfill the requirements of the user.

This is a myth, not a lie. It’s a simplified story that helps us make sense of our experience. Myths like this can serve a useful purpose, but we must take care not to believe in them as if they were the great and hoary truth.

Here are some of the limitations of the myth:

Quality is not a thing and it is not built. To think of it as a thing is to commit the “reification fallacy” that my colleague Michael Bolton loves to hate. Instead, quality is a relationship. Excellent quality is a wonderful sort of relationship. Instead of “building” quality, it’s more coherent to say we arrange for it. Of course you are thinking “what’s the difference between arrange and build? A carpenter could be said to arrange wood into the form of a cabinet. So what?” I like the word arrange because it shifts our attention to relationships and because arrangement suggests less permanence. This is important because in technology we are obliged to work with many elements that are subject to imprecision, ambiguity and drift. A “practice” is not the whole story of how things get done. To say that we accomplish things by following “practices” or “methods” is to use a figure of speech called a synecdoche– the substitution of a part for the whole. What we call practices are the public face of a lot of shadowy behavior that we don’t normally count as part of the way we work. For instance, joking around, or eating a salad at your desk, or choosing which email to read next, and which to ignore. A social researcher examining a project in progress would look carefully at who talks to whom, how they talk and what they talk about. How is status gained or lost? How do people decide what to do next? What are the dominant beliefs about how to behave in the office? How are documents created and marketed around the team? In what ways do people on the team exert or accept control? Source code is not the product. The product is the experience that the user receives. That experience comes from the source code in conjunction with numerous other components that are outside the control and sometimes even the knowledge of product developers. It also comes from documentation and support. And that experience plays out over time on what is probably a chaotic multi-tasking computing environment. “Requirements” are not the requirements, and the “users” are not the users. I don’t know what my requirements are for any of the software I have ever used. I mean, I do know some things. But for anything I think I know, I’m aware that someone else may suggest something that is different that might please me better. Or maybe they will show me how something I thought was important is actually harmful. I don’t know my own requirements for certain. Instead, I make good guesses. Everyone tries to do that. People learn, as they see and work with products, more about what they want. Furthermore, what they want actually changes with their experiences. People change. The users you think you are targeting may not be the users you get. Fulfillment is not forever and everywhere. The state of the world drifts. A requirement fulfilled today may no longer be fulfilled tomorrow, because of a new patch to the operating system, or because a new competing product has been released. Another reason we can’t count on a requirement being fulfilled is that can does not mean will. What I see working with one data set on one computer may not work with other data on another computer.

These factors make certain conversations about quality unhelpful. For instance, I’m impatient when someone claims that unit testing or review will guarantee a great product, because unit testing and review do not account for system level effects, or transient data occurring in the field, or long chains of connected transactions, or intermittent failure of third-party components. Unit testing and review focus on source code. But source code is not the product. So they can be useful, but they are still mere heuristic devices. They provide no guarantee.

Once in a while, I come across a yoho who thinks that a logical specification language like “Z” is the great solution. Because then your specification can be “proven correct.” The big problems with that, of course, is that correctness in this case simply means self-consistency. It does not mean that the specification corresponds to the needs of the customer, nor that it corresponds to the product that is ultimately built.

I’m taking an expansive view of products and projects and quality, because I believe my job is to help people get what they want. Some people, mainly those who go on and on about “disciplined engineering processes” and wish to quantify quality, take a narrower view of their job. I think that’s because their overriding wish is that any problems not be “their fault” but rather YOUR fault. As in, “Hey, I followed the formal spec. If you put the wrong things in the formal spec, that’s YOUR problem, stupid.”

My Take on the Quality Story

Let me offer a more nuanced version of the quality story– still a myth, yes– but one more useful to professionals:

A product is a dynamic arrangement, like a garden that is subject to the elements. A high quality product takes skillful tending and weeding over time. Just like real gardeners, we are not all powerful or all knowing as we grow our crop. We review the conditions and the status of our product as we go. We try to anticipate problems, and we react to solve the problems that occur. We try to understand what our art can and cannot do, and we manage the expectations of our customers accordingly. We know that our product is always subject to decay, and that the tastes of our customers vary. We also know that even the most perfect crop can be spoiled later by a bad chef. Quality, to a significant degree, is out of our hands.



After many years of seeing things work and fail (or work and THEN fail), I think of quality as ephemeral. It may be good enough, at times. It may be better than good enough. But it fades; it always fades, like something natural.

Or like sculpture by Andy Goldsworthy. (Check out this video.)

This is true for all software, but the degree to which it is a problem will vary. Some systems have been built that work well over time. That is the result of excellent thinking and problem solving on the part of the development team. But I would argue it is also the result of favorable conditions in the surrounding environment. Those conditions are subject to change without notice.