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SearchJerry Weinberg on Importance of Software Quality
My friends at Citerus put together a great newsletter. If you don’t mind reading through a little Swedish intro (the content is mostly in English), I’d highly recommend subscribing.
From a recent interview with Jerry Weinberg in their newsletter:
Q: You seem pretty relentless about quality, why is quality so important to you?A: Because if you don’t care about quality, everything else is trivial. (I call this The First Law of Software Engineering.) You need to ship on a certain date? If you don’t care about quality, you just ship. You need to cut costs? If you don’t care about quality, you just stop when you run out of money. You need to boost morale? If you don’t care about quality, you do whatever your people want. (Oh, wait a minute. What if they want quality, even if you don’t care? You want to destroy a professional software organization. Act as if you don’t care about quality. The professionals will leave, either physically or psychologically.)
So, that’s why quality is so important, not just to me, but to our industry. And, until we start caring, we’re not going to get better. And I know we can get better, because when I’ve worked with clients whose entire business (or people’s lives) depends on quality, they produce quality software. Curiously, it turns out that quality software is cheaper in the end, but if you’re not into long-term thinking, you won’t see that.
Matt Blodgett Says:
November 29th, 2007 at 01:24 PM"You want to destroy a professional software organization. Act as if you don’t care about quality. The professionals will leave, either physically or psychologically." What a phenomenal quotation. That very accurately sums up why I've made the career moves I've made. When forced to produce low quality work, I check out psychologically until it's practical for me to check out physically.
Oscar Finnsson Says:
December 3rd, 2007 at 01:03 AMHi Carl! I checked out Andrew Stopford's Weblog (http://weblogs.asp.net/astopford/archive/2007/11/30/mbunit-v3-and-gallio-alpha-1.aspx about MbUnit - a test framework for .Net/Mono) when I came across this is his blog: "Icarus is built on the Presenter-First pattern and I am also doing some work with readapting some of patterns domians to WPF (for a prototype WPF GUI). The pattern is already proving its self in breaking down our concerns and improving the testability of the app." Just thought you might be interested in knowing that the Atom Object pattern is finding its way into the .Net test-framework community. P.S. Great class!