Holger's Blog

I wanted to add something to the topic from two days ago: Quality in the eyes of your users.

There is a thing I did not mention. A practice that could help you and your team achieve a higher quality of your products:

1. Show your work early and often.
2. Improve after receiving feedback.
3. Repeat from step 1.

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In computing, an interface is a shared boundary across which two or more separate components of a computer system exchange information. (Source: Wikipedia.org)

You develop a web application that has a frontend for the users and a backend for the business logic and the data persistence. (This is a simplification, bear with me for a second.) Your frontend accesses the data from the backend through an API that the backend provides. This is the first interface. It’s right there in its name Application Programming Interface. But let’s ignore that one for another second. How does your frontend consume the API? Did you wrap the calls to the API in its own class in the frontend?

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I bet that most people reading this won’t have UAT or QA. So what could you do to still achieve quality in the eyes of your users?

Yours users will spend more time with your software, like it and recommend it more, when they are happy using it. If we’re honest it might even be enough to make them not dislike the software. There is so much crap software out there, that people use to get their job done, that the bar is pretty low.

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During the last months I wrote a lot about quality and how to develop high-quality software. These letters dealt with topics like linting your code, testing and documenting it. I also wrote about the different perspectives and motives that might exist in your team.

But there is one view that I omitted more or less: The external view of your customers. They expect to receive and use your software. They expect it to be without bugs and to fulfill the role they “hired it for”.

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I am an expert in writing and working with Ruby and Ruby on Rails. But today I was in a fortunate position to realise something: By now, I am language-agnostic. With one of my current clients, I am working with Node.js and Angular. There’s even some PHP in there. My client knew that I haven’t worked with any of these technologies before. Yet they wanted to have me anyway. Even for a price that was above their initial budget.

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Today I want to share a small little idea with you. An idea that can have grave consequences if misregarded:

When you schedule a meeting with your team, also share with the team who is responsible for taking minutes/notes. One person has to be responsible for that.

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Since I strongly believe that you can only achieve high-quality work if you trust your teammates, I am trying something today. I trust you.

I will show you a skeleton in my closet.

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Over the weekend I had (kind of) a conversation with a good friend. The topic revolved around doing the work on software projects, and how that is sometimes harder to do in a right way. Because of external factors, or because of company policy. In essence, this creates frustration. Probably nothing new there for you.

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If you want to run a marathon, you have to train for it. Very few people can do that without deliberate training. You have to run for many kilometers consistently and do speed and interval training in between. If you let your training slip, it means your performance on race day will be worse.

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I believe in improving the quality of your software projects. If you want to improve something, you have to measure it first. That idea was introduced by Peter Drucker, the famous management book author.

Now if I ask you, what metrics you could measure about your code quality, would you have an answer?

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