Thursday 2 October 2008

Quality 2.0

"What is Quality?" is yet another of those testing cliches that all experienced testers have argued about ( or read arguments on ) so I am not about to offer up my definition.

I was, however, reading a blog post titled In A Web 2.0 World, Quality Is Irrelevant

The author was not writing about Twitter uptime or Facebook apps crashing, he was writing about traditional journalists adapting to the new Web 2 world with a different definition of quality.

Still, I'm not in full rosy concurrence with the idea that we should kick quality completely to the curb. For one, it's not that quality doesn't matter -- it's that the definition of what constitutes quality is changing. The old idea that quality is defined by editing an article six ways from Sunday so that it's denatured of all passion and advocacy, and so that that it has every freakin' semicolon and middle initial in the correct place -- that's what's dead


Testers, too, can struggle with different definitions of quality.
A release with a known defect can be the equivalent of a missing full stop in a story - hard to let it go and say that it doesn't matter no matter how many times you repeat that "testers are not the gatekeepers"

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