I got curious about the word “Quality” (again!) as I see blogs, and writeups, and talks everywhere, so I decided to do my own search (not research) and find out a bit. The answer was simple and forthcoming without much stress, courtesy google.com and thesaurus.com. And the meanings look comprehensive to me, unless there’s some research paper which would prove that hypothesis incorrect. The search also helped me in tweaking some of my Software Testing efforts with respect to Software Quality. Let’s look at what is Software Quality in a nutshell.
Well, Quality (by the way, Software Quality also) could mean only two things:
As per Google:
- the standard of something as measured against other things of a similar kind; the degree of excellence of something
- a distinctive attribute or characteristic possessed by someone or something
As per Thesaurus.com :
- A value or status
- A characteristic or feature
As you can see, the bullet 1 of definition in Google is the same as bullet 1 of Thesaurus.com, and so is bullet 2. Now let’s look in detail about what these definitions mean.
Software Quality: A Standard / Value / Degree of Excellence / Status
This is a comparison as against something that’s already available, such as a previous version of product, another competing product, an industry standard expectation of how the product should behave (e.g. an RFC). As there is something to compare against, the end-user or the target audience would be able to judge a product against what’s already available and declare if a product is of superior, inferior, or similar Quality. This is subjective to some factors like the competence of the personnel who is doing the comparison, their overall industry and business exposure, the context or the situation in which the product exists, etc. Nevertheless, a comparison to declare the Quality of a product is possible.
Software Quality: A Characteristic / Feature / Distinctive attribute
In cases where even if something comparable is not available, a product can be assessed for its Quality based on a specific characteristic, feature, or a distinctive attribute. For example, a product could support managing 1 million user devices, which might be a feature that is unheard of in a certain industry. Or the product might possess an unique certification which is not possessed by anybody else and nor can be possessed by anyone else. Also, a product might have a characteristic which makes it unique and incomparable with any other product in the market.
As you can see above, the product quality can be deciphered from either one of or both the ways. I will continue to write about this topic in the upcoming blogs.
For detailed analysis of defining Quality attributes for your project in an organisation, feel free to talk to me.