Quality == ?

Part 1 / 2

A wise man asked me in a middle of a meeting, “what is quality? Or… I will rephrase: what is quality for you?”

Caught me unprepared :) I went for the more comfortable answers: zero customer complains, zero bugs, meeting the product requirement etc…

BUT something was missing!

It reminded me a famous quote from the book “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” by Robert Pirsig:

After many hours online, reading most of the “Juran’s Quality Handbook” (it’s a really long book :)) & 12 years in the industry working on various products. I can tell that there are many, many definitions of quality! Some are more related to subjective feelings while others to objective facts. Additionally, professionals define it a bit different depends on the company, product and even manager they work with.

In the following post I will share what I have learned looking up quality and give my personal thoughts.

It all starts with some history

One of the leading advocates for quality was Philip Crosby. In the 70’s he defined quality as “conformance to requirements.” A product that deviates from specifications is likely to be poorly made and unreliable, providing less satisfaction (poor quality) than one that is property constructed (high quality).

“quality is free” doing something right and bugs free the first time is cheaper than fixing it later.

Another approach comes from Joseph Juran, a quality guru of the 20th century. He defining quality as “fitness for use”:

• features of products which meet customer needs and thereby provide customer satisfaction.
• freedom from deficiencies.

“An essential requirement of these products is that they meet the needs of those members of society who will actually use them. This concept of fitness for use is universal. It applies to all goods and services, without exception.”

Additional to the above, there are the 5 different perspective defined by David A.Garvin, a Professor of Business Administration at Harvard business school.

ISTQB finds quality as “The degree to which a component, system or process meets specified requirements and/or user/customer needs and expectations.”

All theses and some other definitions raised me some questions:

• A software with no defects (I don’t believe this software exists) means the product is quality?
• If a product fits me it means that it fits you as well?
• Will this product fit me in 5/10 years?
• Do we really know our user’s requirements? All users has the same requirements?

It’s all about the value

I find Jerry Weinberg’s definition to quality as the most suitable definition:

“Quality is value to some person”[who matters]

Quality goes hand in hand with value, I also believe Value and Quality are in the eye of the beholder. There are many times where I have purchased products that my husband called them a piece of s**t. But for me they were great & very useful. The more he tried to point out the issues/defects/ unnecessarily of them, I found “hacks” & “workarounds”. What we value defines quality or rather defines our tolerance limits for quality.

While quality is value to some person, that doesn’t mean that we’re trying meeting everyone’s needs & requirements. James Bach has added “who matters” to Jerry’s definition. these people are not only the customer or end users. it can also be marketing, other R&D teams or stakeholders.

Quality is always relative to some person. Whenever someone says something about quality, we should ask who is the person behind the quality statement, and what does the individual value.

Next post will talk about defining quality in every step of a product lifecycle…