I recently read Jessica Kerr’s blog post on the quality wheel. In general, I loved her idea of being able to use it to further refine specific aspects of quality software systems. One aspect of her wheel that I didn’t agree with was putting beautiful code as the center item to the quality wheel. I don’t believe that beautiful code is the generalization of quality software systems. For instance, while beautiful code is important - I have found poor quality systems that have had beautiful code. That said, her wheel prompted me to try and create my own ‘quality’ wheel.
My first attempt at a revised wheel didn’t go well. Specific attributes of a genralized quality software system ended up being pie in the sky. For instance, quality attributes that are important to a client application don’t necessarily apply to a consumer based website and vice versa. Being able to catagorically say that one generic attribute is important for all systems seemed impossible - context matters. After several minutes of no inspiration I ended deciding that the only thing I could easily change was the ‘beautiful code’. I replaced it with quality software systems.
Separating Internal vs Exterval views on Quality Software Systems
Two days later I made a second attempt at defining my quality software system wheel. Instead of thinking of quality in a generic sense, I changed my approach and thought of it in terms of a specific project I was working on. In this instance I thought about MaxCut - a system I have been involved with for a few years. Coming up with quality aspects for MaxCut was a lot easier. While trying to identify different attributes I noticed that some of the attributes I was listing were important to me as a software engineer (for instance the simplicity of the code) and had an internal viewpoint.
Other attributes were important were important to an end user and could be good even if the internal workings weren’t great (i.e. how easy features were to discover and use - this has nothing to do with code, but is still an important quality attribute for this system).
This led me to splitting my quality wheel into two wheels - one specifically focussing on external quality attributes and one specifically focussing on internal quality attributes. Taking this idea further, there are possibly a number of additional wheels of quality we could have identified.
Why is this useful?
When we have words that mean different things for different people and these people interact - misunderstandings can occur. Clarifying these words can be useful.
