“Quality is dead,” declared Goranka Bjedov. And I thought to myself, I knew it.

For some time now I’ve been concerned about this. I’d always seen specialised testing as a way to turn a mediocre-quality product into a high-quality product. But the evidence before my own eyes is that the market is full of buggy software. The worst part is, people accept buggy software as the norm and learn to live with it.

We say that nobody can ever be “done” testing, because there is always more than can be tested. There comes a point in any project where the cost of continuing to test outweighs the benefit in releasing earlier, but with unknown bugs.

“The truth is, bad software makes more money” – Goranka Bjedov, STANZ 2011.

I recently watched a project going through a fairly difficult stabilization phase. Too much change towards the end of the development cycle and not enough testing at the start meant that most of the bugs were being found at the end, so the team was looking at a few more weeks of catch up time to find and fix all of the bugs. But, for reasons that I still don’t completely understand, all of the bugs were postponed and it was released anyway. The next two weeks were a mad scramble to fix production bugs, followed by several weeks of less frantic fixing. I was ready to label the project a colossal failure. But the product was actually very well-received by most customers. By the end of the first week, customers were singing praises for the new feature and the project was hailed as a success.

It left me wondering what the point was of having testers on that project at all. I was told that, without testers, it would have been a whole lot worse. Is that rewarding though? Working to make something “not as bad as it could be”?

After STANZ, I stayed with my friend Richard for a few days. Richard is a medical doctor, training in radiation oncology. I asked him if it was depressing being in a job treating cancer, which is a condition that’s difficult to treat and not completely curable.

“Oh not at all” he said. “There are some practical things you can do, to improve quality of life”.
“But,” I pressed, “when people think cancer, they usually think that’s it for them. It seems like you’re just fighting an uphill battle.”
“Everyone dies eventually, of something,” he explained. “But I know that there’s things I can do that means they’re not going to die today. And the quality of life they have in the meantime can be made a lot better.”
I nodded. “I guess that’s true.”
“Once you accept mortality, medicine’s not that hard. It’s actually quite rewarding.”

Perhaps we need a mentality shift, and a different way of seeing our role. If we see ourselves as the cure for bad software, then we’re going to be repeatedly disappointed.

I emailed my friend James Martin for his perspective, and he offered this one:

How about working to make something ‘better’. What if all any of us did, regardless of job title, was try as hard as we could to make the best stuff possible, accepting the fact that even the best of us has only a fragile grasp of what it takes to make something that another person will be delighted by.

Personally, it helps me to think that my whole job description is ‘to make things better’. That way I can solve problems using whatever tools feel right for the task at hand and I don’t feel constrained by someone else’s opinion of who I should be and what I should do.

As usual, the people setting the ‘standards’ for our ‘profession’ do so without knowing our context. But we can set our own standards for ourselves and play by our own rules. I like to think that you and I did that last year. I still think of what we did at Campaign Monitor as my best work.

If quality is dead, what are we doing here?
If we are adding value, what is it and how do we measure it?

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