Originally posted by Rob Keefer:
How do you define a quality product at your organization? How do you decide when the product is good enough to ship to your general users? Surely there are system specs that need to be met, do you also include some kind of usability measure?
Hi Rob,
A formal definition from Manufacturing defines quality as "Meeting or exceeding customers' expectations".
In my experience a customer expects
(a) The software will do what the customer
needs.
(b) The software is easy / intuitive for the customer to use.
If you provide software that meets the requirements then
you should be guaranteed bug-free and error-free code. This goes most of the way to satisfying (a) above. However the quality gap here can arise because what the customer needs and what they asked for are usually not the same. Therefore the other important step for quality is to ensure that the requirements are what the customer actually needs.
The user experience is the part of quality that is most often overlooked. This includes look & feel, navigation and performance.
HTH,
Fintan