Beliefs about quality I want to disprove

I’ve had software interface quality on my mind for most of my career. Here are some things I believe are true. I would prefer that they are not.

1. Quality is easiest when one person can keep the whole interface in their head.
2. The more people who work on some software, the harder high quality is.
3. The more high quality things you have in your life, the better your life is.
4. The lower the quality of your product, the more people will abandon it.
5. More people will talk about your product if quality is high.
6. Quality depends on permission from whoever is most powerful at an organisation.
7. Quality cannot be a bottom-up effort, driven only by the people who do the work.
8. High quality always requires a sacrifice of something, e.g. scope, money, growth, or time.
9. High quality always requires someone to have a strong personal interest/obsession with it.
10. A focus on quality means a sacrifice of growth.
11. Quality is both harder and more important for software that is used often.
12. Quality is a competitive moat because so few organisations focus on it.
13. You should ideally hire good people if you want high quality.
14. If you cannot hire good people you should be willing to iterate a lot.
15. You need to iterate a lot more than expected to get high quality.
16. Some organisational cultures are incapable of high quality.
17. The larger the organisation, the harder quality becomes. At a certain size of organisation high quality is impossible.
18. The larger the software, the harder quality becomes. At a certain size of software high quality is impossible.
19. If something is low quality in some software, it’s usually a reliable sign that other things are low quality.
20. Some types of quality are not always immediately obvious.
21. Perfection is impossible.
22. Products and companies can fail because they focused on quality at the expense of other things.
23. Quality requires that everything be given a lot of attention.
24. Even though everyone agrees quality is positive, it is hard to convince people to focus on it.
25. Some people want high quality in their personal lives, but don’t care enough about it in their professional lives.
26. Many commercial goals hurt quality, e.g. growth.
27. Quality is a constant effort. Problems can slip in quietly, especially as changes are made.
28. The only reliable way to measure quality is to have lots of experts look at the software.
29. Focus on quality has diminishing returns. It takes much more effort to achieve “90%” quality than it did to achieve “80%” quality.
30. The systems in place to help create software (e.g. design systems) can also hurt efforts to focus on quality.
31. People associate expressive visual styles with visual quality. They may expect expressive visual styles in high quality software even when it’s not needed.
32. People associate high cost with quality.
33. People associate hype/community interest with quality.
34. There are many ways to compete that cost less than quality, e.g. features, price, sales experience.
35. People may leave a company because they cannot focus on quality as much as they’d like to.
36. Novelty is more immediately attractive to people than high quality.
37. High quality is often not noticed until later.
38. Organisations and people will almost never tell the truth about the low quality of their products.

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