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.
You're Probably Using the Wrong Dictionary
As if a word were no more than coordinates
The New Oxford American dictionary, by the way, is not like singularly bad. Googleâs dictionary, the modern Merriam-Webster, the dictionary at dictionary.com: theyâre all like this. Theyâre all a chore to read. Thereâs no play, no delight in the language. The definitions are these desiccated little husks of technocratic meaningese, as if a word were no more than its coordinates in semantic space.
Another mind as alive as yours
In 1807, Webster started writing a dictionary, which he called, boldly, An American Dictionary of the English Language. He wanted it to be comprehensive, authoritative. Think of that: a man sits down, aiming to capture his language whole.
Dictionaries today are not written this way. In fact itâd be strange even to say that theyâre written. They are built by a large team, less a work of art than of engineering. When you read an entry you donât get the sense that a person labored at his desk, alone, trying to put the essence of that word into words. That is, you donât get a sense, the way you do from a good novel, that there was another mind as alive as yours on the other side of the page.
Websterâs dictionary took him 26 years to finish. It ended up having 70,000 words. He wrote it all himself, including the etymologies, which required that he learn 28 languages, including Old English, Gothic, German, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Welsh, Russian, Aramaic, Persian, Arabic, and Sanskrit. He was plagued by debt to fund the project; he had to mortgage his home.
A soft and fitful luster
Who decided that the American public couldnât handle âa soft and fitful lusterâ? I canât help but think something has been lost. âA soft sparkle from a wet or oily surfaceâ doesnât just sound worse, it actually describes the phenomenon with less precision. In particular it misses the shimmeriness, the micro movement and action, âthe fitful luster,â of, for example, an eye full of tears â which is by the way far more intense and interesting an image than âa wet sidewalk.â
Itâs as if someone decided that dictionaries these days had to sound like they were written by a Xerox machine, not a person, certainly not a person with a poetâs ear, a man capable of high and mighty English, who set out to write the secular American equivalent of the King James Bible and pulled it off.
Pathos
With its blunt authority the New Oxford definition of âpathosâ â âa quality that evokes pity or sadnessâ â shuts down the conversation, it shuts down your thinking about the word, while the Websterâs version gets your wheels turning: it seems so much more provisional â âthat which awakens tender emotions, such as pity, sorrow, and the like; contagious warmth of feeling, action, or expression; pathetic quality; as, the pathos of a picture, of a poem, or of a cryâ â and therefore alive.
Most important, it describes a word worth using: a mere six letters that have come to stand for something huge, for a complex meta-emotion with mythic roots. Such is the power of actual English.
An affection for words
Thereâs an amazing thing that happens when you start using the right dictionary. Knowing that itâs there for you, you start looking up more words, including words you already know. And you develop an affection for even those, the plainest most everyday words, because you see them treated with the same respect awarded to the rare ones, the high-sounding ones.
Which is to say you get a feeling about English that Calvin once got with his pet tiger on a day of fresh-fallen snow: âItâs a magical world, Hobbes. Letâs go exploring!â