High Quality

The High Quality that comes out of a process is affected by the quality of what goes in and what happens at every step along the way. It follows that we must build quality into every step, process, and system to produce quality in the outcome. To do this, we must collaborate with internal and external suppliers and communicate with internal and external customers to determine their needs.

Who should care about High Quality software? Everyone should care, from the gamer who would like the game he's playing to not crash and to provide a consistently realistic (even if highly imaginative) experience, to the astronauts whose lives will be lost if the software running their craft fails, to the entire human race that could be wiped out (at least theoretically) due to a software bug that happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

What is high-quality software? Software Information of all sorts circulated among sentient beings.

• More pertinently, information circulated among humans that serve a dual purpose:

o        To communicate with humans at other locales and/or other times

o        To serve as a set of "orders" for automatons to follow

• When software is in a form that is of little use for its intended purpose to an automaton, that form becomes more like documentation.

• Similarly, when put in a form that is of little use to other humans, that form becomes more like just a component of the automaton(s). (Consider the software in embedded systems, such as microwave ovens and inexpensive digital wristwatches. In this form, it's more like a commodity.)

• High Quality fulfills its specifications.

The word "software" is defined first, above, to clarify what is sometimes a mistaken assumption about what is meant by " High Quality software" -- that it applies, nearly exclusively, to writing code (in a language such as C or Java) that doesn't crash, that works as expected, etc.

For example, the definitions above hint at the recursive nature of evaluating even a fairly simple computer program: the program itself is, of course, software, but so are the specifications for that program, which, in turn, are very likely to have, perhaps implicit, specifications themselves, and so on.

When intended for use in an environment where reliability, robustness, etc. are crucial, software must itself be robust. When intended for use by human beings, software must, at least, tolerate the ways human beings actually behave. Therefore, it must meet high-quality guidelines for user interface design.