quality
It passes by the river
SAFe is oriented around volume, not value
To bring out its noblest qualities
We classify too much and enjoy too little
All the way to the last bolt
v0.crap
- ââWriting, Brieflyââ
What excellence is
The aspiration for quality
Eating your own dog food
More profitable and a better buy
Maybe I should sharpen soon
You'll know it's there
Jobs's father had once taught him that a drive for perfection meant caring about the craftsmanship even of the parts unseen. Jobs applied that to the layout of the circuit board inside the Apple II. He rejected the initial design because the lines were not straight enough.
In an interview a few years later, after the Macintosh came out, Jobs again reiterated that lesson from his father: "When you're a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you're not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You'll know it's there, so you're going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through."
Measured by the number of its features
A primary cause of complexity is that software vendors uncritically adopt almost any feature that users want. Any incompatibility with the original system concept is either ignored or passes unrecognized, which renders the design more complicated and its use more cumbersome. When a system's power is measured by the number of its features, quantity becomes more important than quality. Every new release must offer additional features, even if some don't add functionality.
There is no kogin that can be called poor
Ensuring Excellence
An Article by Marty CaganâŚin so many of the best product companies there is an additional dimension that goes beyond individual empowered product teams, and even goes beyond achieving business results.
It has to do with ensuring a level of what Iâll refer to here as âexcellenceâ although that is clearly a very ambiguous term.
Over the years, this concept has been referred to by many different names, always necessarily vague, but all striving to convey the same thing: âdesirability,â âaha moments,â âwow factor,â âmagic experiences,â or âcustomer delight,â to list just a few.
The concept is that an effective product that achieves results is critical, but sometimes we want to go even beyond that, to provide something special.
Maybe itâs because we believe this is needed to achieve the necessary value. Maybe itâs because the company has built its brand on inspiring customers.
Often this dimension shows up most clearly in product design, where functional, usable but uninspiring designs can often achieve our business results, but great design can propel us into this realm of the inspiring.
Avant-Garde and Kitsch
An Essay by Clement GreenbergCapitalism in decline finds that whatever of quality it is still capable of producing becomes almost invariably a threat to its own existence.
Weinberg's Law
AÂ Quote by Gerald WeinbergIf builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.
The value-destroying effect of arbitrary date pressure on code
An Article by Gandalf HudlowThe mandate from above is clear, just get it done! Avoid everything that's in the way: all advice, all expertise, all discovery efforts that detract from hitting the Dateâ˘!
What these organizations don't realize is that all software change can be modeled as three components: Value, Filler and Chaos. Chaos destroys Value and Filler is just functionality that nobody wants. When date pressure is applied to software projects, the work needed to remove Chaos is subtly placed on the chopping block. Work like error handling, clear logging, chaos & load testing and other quality work is quietly deferred in favor of hitting the Dateâ˘.
Minimum Awesome Product
An Article by Carlos BeneytoUsers are accustomed to a minimum of quality, and they expect that of all new products.
If our product does not [meet basic expectations of quality], people will automatically believe that it is a bad product and they will not take it seriously. It is not what they expect.
Hence my suggestion that the MVP has died and the MAP: Minimum Awesome Product was born.
What happens to user experience in a minimum viable product?
An Article by Ryan Singer"Feature complexity is like surface area and quality of execution is like height. I want a base level of quality execution across all features. Whenever I commit to building or expanding a feature, I'm committing to a baseline of effort on the user experience."
Thereâs a distinction to make: The set of features you choose to build is one thing. The level you choose to execute at is another. You can decide whether or not to include a feature like âreset passwordâ. But if you decide to do it, you should live up to a basic standard of execution on the experience side.
Features can be different sizes with more or less complexity, but quality of experience should be constant across all features. That constant quality of experience is what gives your customers trust. It demonstrates to them that whatever you build, you build well.
Why YKK zippers are the brown M&Ms of product design
An Article by Josh CentersA âpro tipâ for evaluating the quality of a piece of gear is to look at the small details, such as zippers and stitching. Cheap-minded manufacturers will skimp on those details because most people just donât notice, and even a cheap component will often last past a basic warranty period, so itâs an easy way to increase profits without losing sales or returns.
If a designer does bother to invest in quality components, thatâs a tried-and-true sign that the overall product is better than the competition.
The McNamara fallacy
AÂ DefinitionThe McNamara fallacy, named for Robert McNamara, the US Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968, involves making a decision based solely on quantitative observations (or metrics) and ignoring all others. The reason given is often that these other observations cannot be proven.
The fallacy refers to McNamara's belief as to what led the United States to defeat in the Vietnam Warâspecifically, his quantification of success in the war (e.g., in terms of enemy body count), ignoring other variables.
Artifice, blindness, and suicide
AÂ QuoteThe first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. This is OK as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can't be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide.
Figma's Engineering Values: Craftsmanship
An ArticleCraftsmanship is about thoughtfulness and care in the work we do. It means being deliberate about what we build and how possible it will be to maintain and extend in the future. A solution that will require revisiting in a month â because itâs not scaling, because it has a ton of bugs, because it doesnât support all the use cases it needs to â is not useful to us and ultimately will generate pain for our users.
What we trade off by living this value is (sometimes) day-to-day speed. Itâs easy to imagine an engineering team that emphasizes moving fast over keeping things stable and bug-free -- like a team building a product that isnât responsible for important user data and doesnât support anyoneâs livelihood. But given the role the Figma product plays in the lives of our users, we feel itâs worth it to ensure we hold a high quality bar for them. And in the long run, being thoughtful about how we build often reduces the complexity of ongoing development and new features regardless.
The psychology of a discount
An Article by John MaedaFound on a wall.
The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten.
Rationality: From AI to Zombies
- ââThe Tao of rationalityââ
- ââEveryone sees themselves as behaving normallyââ
- ââArgue against the bestââ
- ââLet the meaning choose the wordââ
- ââPeople can stand for what is true, for they are already enduring itââ
- ââDo not propose solutionsââ
- ââOne brickââ
- ââYour intention to cutââ
The Tao of rationality
If you would learn to think like reality, then here is the Tao:
Since the beginning
not one unusual thing
has ever happened.Everyone sees themselves as behaving normally
To understand why people act the way they do, we must first realize that everyone sees themselves as behaving normally.
Argue against the best
To argue against an idea honestly, you should argue against the best arguments of the strongest advocates.
Itâs all too easy to argue that someone is exhibiting Bias #182 in your repertoire of fully generic accusations, but you canât settle a factual issue without closer evidence. If there are biased reasons to say the sun is shining, that doesnât make it dark out.
Let the meaning choose the word
What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around.
Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get oneâs meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations.
People can stand for what is true, for they are already enduring it
Knowing the design
Knowing the design can tell you much about the designer; and knowing the designer can tell you much about the design.
Cutting through to the truth
The essential thing in the art of epistemic rationality is to understand how every rule is cutting through to the truth in the same movement.
Your sword has no blade. It has only your intention. When that goes astray you have no weapon.
Joy in the merely attainable
But the really fundamental problem with desiring the unattainable is that as soon as you actually get it, it stops being unattainable. If we cannot take joy in the merely available, our lives will always be frustrated.
I have failed my art
The novice goes astray and says, âThe art has failed me.â
The master goes astray and says, âI have failed my art."Taboo your words
Albert says that people have âfree will.â Barry says that people donât have âfree will.â Well, that will certainly generate an apparent conflict. Most philosophers would advise Albert and Barry to try to define exactly what they mean by âfree will,â on which topic they will certainly be able to discourse at great length. I would advise Albert and Barry to describe what it is that they think people do, or do not have, without using the phrase âfree willâ at all.
Your map of reality
Reality is very largeâjust the part we can see is billions of lightyears across. But your map of reality is written on a few pounds of neurons, folded up to fit inside your skull. I donât mean to be insulting, but your skull is tiny. Comparatively speaking. Inevitably, then, certain things that are distinct in reality, will be compressed into the same point on your map. But what this feels like from inside is not that you say, âOh, look, Iâm compressing two things into one point on my map.â What it feels like from inside is that there is just one thing, and you are seeing it.
What you're trying to swim
There is an art to using words; even when definitions are not literally true or false, they are often wiser or more foolish. Dictionaries are mere histories of past usage; if you treat them as supreme arbiters of meaning, it binds you to the wisdom of the past, forbidding you to do better. Though do take care to ensure (if you must depart from the wisdom of the past) that people can figure out what youâre trying to swim.
Applause lights
Most applause lights are much more blatant, and can be detected by a simple reversal test.
For example, suppose someone says: We need to balance the risks and opportunities of AI.
If you reverse this statement, you get: We shouldnât balance the risks and opportunities of AI.Since the reversal sounds abnormal, the unreversed statement is probably normal, implying it does not convey new information. There are plenty of legitimate reasons for uttering a sentence that would be uninformative in isolation. âWe need to balance the risks and opportunities of AIâ can introduce a discussion topic; it can emphasize the importance of a specific proposal for balancing; it can criticize an unbalanced proposal. Linking to a normal assertion can convey new information to a bounded rationalistâthe link itself may not be obvious. But if no specifics follow, the sentence is probably an applause light.
Reality just seems to go on crunching
I once met a fellow who thought that if you used General Relativity to compute a low-velocity problem, like an artillery shell, General Relativity would give you the wrong answerânot just a slow answer, but an experimentally wrong answerâbecause at low velocities, artillery shells are governed by Newtonian mechanics, not General Relativity. This is exactly how physics does not work. Reality just seems to go on crunching through General Relativity, even when it only makes a difference at the fourteenth decimal place, which a human would regard as a huge waste of computing power. Physics does it with brute force. No one has ever caught physics simplifying its calculationsâor if someone did catch it, the Matrix Lords erased the memory afterward.
Mystery exists in the mind
Mystery exists in the mind, not in reality. If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself. All the more so if it seems like no possible answer can exist: Confusion exists in the map, not in the territory. Unanswerable questions do not mark places where magic enters the universe. They mark places where your mind runs skew to reality.
Lost purposes
Thereâs chocolate at the supermarket, and you can get to the supermarket by driving, and driving requires that you be in the car, which means opening your car door, which needs keys. If you find thereâs no chocolate at the supermarket, you wonât stand around opening and slamming your car door because the car door still needs opening. I rarely notice people losing track of plans they devised themselves.
Itâs another matter when incentives must flow through large organizationsâor worse, many different organizations and interest groups, some of them governmental. Then you see behaviors that would mark literal insanity, if they were born from a single mind. Someone gets paid every time they open a car door, because thatâs whatâs measurable; and this person doesnât care whether the driver ever gets paid for arriving at the supermarket, let alone whether the buyer purchases the chocolate, or whether the eater is happy or starving.