Re: Interesting article ZDNet re informal software development quality

[George Capehart <gwc () acm org>]

On Wednesday 07 January 2004 08:15 am, Bruce Ediger wrote:

<snip>

> My only beef with what both of you just said is that "quality" is
> sort of a catch all.  It can (and does) mean different things:
>
>       Fast to market
>       Delivered on schedule
>       Fully featured
>       Fully documented
>       Does not crash
>       Meets 100% of requirements
>       Bug free
>       Looks very nice on-screen
>       Runs fast
>       Formally verified
>       Standards compliant
>       Followed some methodology

Bruce,

I see the point you're making.  I just think that, in the world of QA, 
that is not a valid statement.  I would suggest that if you dig around 
a little in the QA/TQM/Six Sigma universes and in the ISO/ANSI/NIST/SEI 
universes you will see something different.  Some sample URLs:

http://www.sqa.org
http://www.asqc.org
http://standards.computer.org
http://www.iso.org
http://www.w3c.org/QA
http://www.mazur.net/tqm/tqmterms.htm
http://www.gstis.utexas.edu/~rpollack/tqm.html

Like security, quality is a process.  My favorite definition of quality 
is "Do it right the first time."

My $0.02.

Cheers,

George Capehart
--
George W. Capehart

"If you can't describe what you're doing as a process, you don't know
 what you're doing."  -- W. Edwards Deming