Quotes About Quality

Nobody cares what the entrée is..... if the appetizer is turds in a blanket!

The customers, mostly well-to-do vacationers with little knowledge of turquoise, were using a standard principle—a stereotype—to guide their buying: "expensive = good.

In this case, because we know that the things that are difficult to possess are typically better than those that are easy to possess, we can often use an item's availability to help us quickly and correctly decide on its quality.

Consider the results of a study conducted at Northwestern University. Researchers gave online participants information about a pair of sofas we'll call the Dream and the Titan. The two, manufactured by different furniture companies, were comparable in all respects except for their cushions. The Dream's cushions were softer and more comfortable than the Titan's but less durable. In

higher price typically reflects higher quality.

Price alone had become a trigger feature for quality; and a dramatic increase in price alone had led to a dramatic increase in sales among the quality-hungry buyers. Click, whirr!

O preço sozinho havia se tornado uma característica desencadeadora de uma percepção de qualidade após ter sido aumentado.3

Where you find quality, you will find a craftsman, not a quality-control expert.

Is it my imagination, or does shipping and handling settle a box of crackers more than it used to?

The true professional knows that delivering function at the expense of structure is a fool's errand. It is the structure of your code that allows it to be flexible. If you compromise the structure, you compromise the future.

But I can write my tests later", you say. No, you can't. Not really. Oh, you can write some tests later. You can even approach high coverage later if you are careful to measure it. But the tests you write after the fact are defense. Tests you write first are offense. After-the-fact tests are written by someone who is already vested in the code and already knows how the problem was solved. There's just no way those tests can be anywhere near as incisive as tests written first.

Whatever else a TODO might be, it is not an excuse to leave bad code in the system.

Duplication is the primary enemy of a well-designed system. It represents additional work, additional risk, and additional unnecessary complexity.

First Law You may not write production code until you have written a failing unit test. Second Law You may not write more of a unit test than is sufficient to fail, and not compiling is failing. Third Law You may not write more production code than is sufficient to pass the currently failing test.

QA and Development should be working together to ensure the quality of the system. The

Error handling is important, but if it obscures logic, it's wrong.

No matter how elegant it is, no matter how readable and accessible, if it hath not tests, it be unclean. Dave

The unit tests are documents. They describe the lowest-level design of the system.

If we all checked-in our code a little cleaner than when we checked it out, the code simply could not rot.

Code, without tests, is not clean. No matter how elegant it is, no matter how readable and accessible, if it hath not tests, it be unclean. Dave

Without tests every change is a possible bug. No

What this team did not realize was that having dirty tests is equivalent to, if not worse than, having no tests.

If you let the tests rot, then your code will rot too. Keep your tests clean.

If you think good architecture is expensive, try bad architecture. —Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder