In my experience (and I have a great deal of that), true product Quality is dependent upon an endemic cultural philosophy of an organization; not a single tool or technique. It's a shared discipline, and a cultural imperative.
It's like those ads for exercise machines, where professional athletic models, who train for five hours a day, and drink broccoli smoothies for lunch, are shown using a machine for a couple of minutes, with the inference that the machine is the reason for their washboard abs.
The Quality formula is hundreds; if not thousands, of years old. Software development is just another context.
There are significant costs to doing real Quality, which is the main reason that more people don't do it.
One of the biggest costs, is that there isn't really that much money to be made, doing superb Quality. You get to sell to snooty customers, and feel smug, but there just ain't that many people that are willing to pay the premium for top Quality.
Dreck sells. People who get truly rich, seldom do so, selling Quality. The ones that do, have that endemic culture. It's really difficult (and expensive) to maintain that; especially at scale. Lots of humbling and hiring expensive, cranky old craftsmen that can be difficult to work with.
You just need good enough quality and prevent total catastrophes that would drive customers away.
A lot of the time it is about making sure that stuff just works and not about testing edge cases - in my current company we did not really care about edge cases and I don't remember when we had an issue because of something like that. Mostly issues are popping up because people don't understand how things work or how they should work.
People not understanding how things work leads to "exercise machine" metaphor, because to keep all people updated with knowledge is hard work that needs to be done every working day and it is hard work that costs a lot of money. For this "test-automation" and "low-code" solutions are promising that you can put your domain knowledge into such "exercise machine" and have it regardless if you keep people or let them go, if they spend time learning about system or not. Which is a false premise just like "excercise machine" giving six-pack without much work.
First off, we totally agree on this: "true product Quality is dependent upon an endemic cultural philosophy of an organization."
What we're asking you to consider is how much of that is because the tooling is shutting out the roles who are naturally incentivized to care about product quality?
I think your broader thesis, while amusing, is ignoring some of the biggest and most valuable brands ever created... Apple, Rolex, Mercedes...
> I think your broader thesis, while amusing, is ignoring some of the biggest and most valuable brands ever created... Apple, Rolex, Mercedes...
Hey, thanks for the condescension. I thought we didn't do things like that on HN, but I am often wrong.
I actually worked for one of them "biggest and most valuable brands" for a couple of decades, so there's a good chance that my "thesis" might have legs.
Look, I actually agree with a lot of what you wrote, but I wasn't deliberately calling your baby ugly, and don't really appreciate the reaction. I did not mean to attack you, and am actually sorry that my comment was perceived as such. If I could delete the first line of my comment, I would. It's accurate, but I can see it as being inflammatory.
[EDIT] I'll see if @dang, or someone, can delete it.
Thanks @dang. It's gone now. I 100% stand behind the remaining text. If y'all dig around in my HN handle (which might have been helpful before taking a swipe at me), you might be able to figure out which company I worked for, and why this actually gives my "thesis" some level of veracity.
It's like those ads for exercise machines, where professional athletic models, who train for five hours a day, and drink broccoli smoothies for lunch, are shown using a machine for a couple of minutes, with the inference that the machine is the reason for their washboard abs.
The Quality formula is hundreds; if not thousands, of years old. Software development is just another context.
There are significant costs to doing real Quality, which is the main reason that more people don't do it.
One of the biggest costs, is that there isn't really that much money to be made, doing superb Quality. You get to sell to snooty customers, and feel smug, but there just ain't that many people that are willing to pay the premium for top Quality.
Dreck sells. People who get truly rich, seldom do so, selling Quality. The ones that do, have that endemic culture. It's really difficult (and expensive) to maintain that; especially at scale. Lots of humbling and hiring expensive, cranky old craftsmen that can be difficult to work with.
Lot of broccoli smoothies.