Even though he’s talking just about the development of his iPhone application, Buzz Andersen hits the nail on the head about why quality matters for the long-term success of any software product:
One of the hardest things about shipping Birdfeed was staying committed to slaving away on such minutae while other, often less polished, clients beat me to market.
While such attention to detail may not be appreciated in the specific case, however, I’ve found that in aggregate it leads to an overall impression of quality that attracts the kind of fanatically devoted users who form the backbone of a growing, long term user base.
Attention to detail is the only way to develop high quality software, and high quality software is what leads to users so happy to use your product, it sells itself by word-of-mouth.
However, you’ve included one sneaky little item in your list of “vectors” that certainly isn’t related to quality: features. That’s what you need to reduce if you want to concentrate on the other aspects, and reducing scope is almost certainly the key skill of all developers of great software.
If you can’t reduce the scope, you need to allow yourself enough time to pay attention to all the necessary details you mention. Setting yourself a goal for functionality is fine as long as you take the time to make sure you’re creating a high-quality product as well.
My point is simply that without your definition of quality you and I can spend almost as much time arguing about what it is as actually creating it. There are many more items that some will consider important for their definition of quality than the ones I listed above.
This may sounds cynical but quality is associated with software success but not mandatory for software success.
If you fill a niche in the market at the right time, you may have success despite having poor quality.
But it may be fair to say it very hard to sustain success with poor quality software.
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