Want more...Quality

If you live in the United States, you have been witnessing the struggles between President Obama (a Democrat), the House of Representatives (controlled by the Republican Party), the Senate (controlled by the Democratic Party).  Compromise is often key to getting things done in politics, but we must never sacrifice the quality of life of our citizens and visitors.  When we are defining the feature set for our products, we have great input from our customers about everything they need and want.  At the same time, we only have some many developers and so many hours in the day.  I'm sure that many of you face similar challenges and choices in your projects.  Often, there are compromises that have to be made.  Product Quality is one area where we will not compromise. The results of our focus on quality has led to better and better releases over the past three RAD Studio, Delphi, C++Builder, and RadPHP versions.

Chris Pattinson, Embarcadero Technologies' Director of Quality Assurance, has written a great series of blog posts about our Quality Engineering Maturity Model and the results for product releases.  You'll that his posts also bring you inside on the inner workings of our quality efforts:

• The Embarcadero Quality Maturity Model


• Quality Standards


• Quality Development - A few best practices for distributed teams


• Embarcadero Automated Test Model


• Embarcadero product certification testing


• RADStudio XE - Quality Review and Metrics


• Quality Assurance - Christmas Cookie Analogy


• Embarcadero Annual RAD Studio/Delphi/C++Builder Quality Survey

How do project and people come together to complete a quality product?  Team work on all fronts along field testing with our customers.  Big thanks go out to all of our beta testers who help us cross the RTM (Release To Manufacturing) finish line. The following are links to some articles and bog posts about compromise in software development projects:

• The Software Development Compromise


• Consensus versus Compromise


• The Art of Compromise: Scrum and Project Governance (Note: Embarcadero uses Scrum on project projects)


• Agility must not compromise stability


• Never Compromise the Q


• Tradeoffs, compromises and the future of tablets


• Managing Scope Creep: Don't Gold Plate My Project!


• iPhone OS4 Multitasking: Trade offs and Compromises

Let's hope our politicians and president will reach a consensus compromise before August 2, 2011.  I also hope that we can keep a civil level of discourse on the road to completion.  I know that everyone is very passionate about their specific feelings and beliefs.  Even though we may have different opinions about what makes a great product, what a product should have for features, and when a product should be completed, there are often realities beyond the technology, people, money, and time that will cause us to have to compromise.

Quality Central exists for you to give us direct feedback into the features and quality issues in our products.  The team reviews all of the suggestions and reports.  Use your votes and your ratings to escalate issues.  Add maintenance to your product purchase so that you can further escalate feature requests and problem reports to our developer support team.

Here are a selection of quotes on quality in life and software:

• “Quality is not an act, it is a habit.” - Aristotle


• “Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.” - Henry Ford


• “Do or do not… there is no try.” - Yoda


• “Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.” - Steve Jobs


• “There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.” - Alan J. Perlis


• “You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time.” - Bertrand Meyer


• "We all tend to tie our self-esteem strongly to the quality of the product we produce - not the quantity of the product, but the quality." and "Quality is free, but only to those who are willing to pay heavily for it."  - Timothy Lister and Tom DeMarco in the book, Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams


• "Improving quality will reduce expenses while increasing productivity and market share." - W. Edwards Demming


• "The quality of a person's life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence, regardless of their chosen field of endeavor." - Vince Lombardi


• "I do not think that there is any other quality so essential to success of any kind as the quality of perseverance. It overcomes almost everything, even nature." - John D. Rockefeller


• "Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction and skillful execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives." - William Adlebert Foster


• "It costs a lot to build bad products." - Norman Ralph Augustine


• "A task well done is its own reward." - Ralph Waldo Emerson


• "I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter." - Blaise Pascal

You have to know (and I guess believe me when I write) that our Embarcadero engineering, product, marketing, sales, support, operations, and finance teams all care about our customers and the products we create.  There are amazing things going on inside the company.  We'll have some exciting news for all developers RSN (Real Soon Now).  We might compromise on features but we will never compromise on quality.  We take the relationship with every developer very seriously.  We are a company of developers, lead by our CEO, Wayne Williams, who is a developer.