http://www.agile-software-development.com/2008/01/definition-of-agile-software.html

Kelly Waters
All About Agile

I think it is a curious thing that to be able to deliver something quickly one must consider quality.

Generally when I consider quality I seem to think that higher quality takes a longer time to achieve than lower quality. I guess this ties in with the belief that en masse production results in lower quality than something that is produced in single bits. This does not necessarily hold true of course but I feel that is usually the general belief in most fields.

I wonder to how many fields this “speedy production == lower quality” notion applies to. Software development seems not to be part of that because as Steve McConnell mentions in one of his books: concentrating on quality almost always reduces production time.

Somehow that is hard to believe in reality but easy to understand intellectually after studying it for a while.

When I refer to quality I’m considering a wide range of traits, some of which the customer will recognise as important e.g. performance and defect as well as an aesthetic of the software its self e.g. design quality, conformance with good design practices such as encapsulation, loose coupling etc.

All of these aspects of quality affect out ability to modify software according to new business need. In particular a good test suite will support our ability to refactor which is necessary if we wish to embrace changing needs.

Hope that clarifies things, thanks for commenting.

Here’s some questions that popped into my head after reading this:

What do you mean by quality?

Do you mean to say that value is built on top of embracing the change and that embracing the change is built on top of quality or what do you mean by those arrows?