What is Software Qualityand?

What is Software Quality?

Quality is an overarching goal in software design. The terms “software quality” and “code quality” are not the same thing. Software quality is more about product quality from the user or company perspective, which has a more outward looking feel with issues such as functionality and usability. Code quality is what software developers work on every day. Having quality coding practices is a pre-requisite for software quality, so there's much overlap.

How do we improve both types of “quality”?

First, let's acknowledge the subjectivity. Some groups of people are more focused on “software quality” than “code quality” as a goal. Salespeople want the product to have the hot features. Marketing wants a nice UI and a “positioning” in the market (what is so great about the letter P?). Support wants nobody to call.

For those working on the internals of software, everybody has a different view of code quality. Quality engineers want everything to be perfect before it ships. Project managers want to hit the date by time-boxing features out. Developers want, well, who knows, because every developer has a different but deeply-held belief about this topic.

Second, let's examine the metrics for quality code. It's runtime things like: has cool features, doesn't crash or spin, and is performant. And it's static things like: readability, modularity, and so on. And there are future-looking metrics such as: maintainability, extensibility, etc. There are various techniques to enhance these types of metrics, which we examine in the following chapters.

Third, let's take a top-down look. What does “software quality” or “code quality” mean on the executive floor? Probably it means any software that has “AI” features, so the CEO can say that buzzword in the earnings call about a hundred times. I heard on TikTok that McKinsey research proved that stocks appreciate by sqrt(pi/8) percentage points for every mention.

Finally, let's take a bottom-up look, which is really most of this chapter and the following chapters. We are talking about C++ coding, after all. There are a lot of practical techniques that can be used to improve the delivery of quality software through improvements to C++ code quality and other areas.

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