{"id":21,"date":"2009-11-05T10:13:07","date_gmt":"2009-11-05T17:13:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/?p=21"},"modified":"2009-11-08T22:26:32","modified_gmt":"2009-11-09T05:26:32","slug":"finding-quality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/finding-quality\/","title":{"rendered":"Finding Quality"},"content":{"rendered":"

Leave it to Adam Goucher<\/a> to beat me to the punch line. When I proposed that breaking down your definition of quality to a manageable set of ilities<\/a> is a reasonable method for improving customer perceived quality, the logical next step is to try and find out which of the ilities you need to care about. Adam suggestion was:<\/p>\n

Want to improve v2? Talk to customers of v1 and ask which of the ilities they suffer the most from. And\/or talk to people who didn\u2019t buy your software and ask them which ility chased them away. Those are the ones that count.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Perfect answer, but keep in mind that the questions you ask are critical. You can\u2019t ask \u201cdo you want the product to be more reliable\u201d, or even \u201cfrom this list, choose the one you care about the most\u201d. For former question will always result in a \u201cyes\u201d answer, and the second will probably just result in confusion. Instead, you can ask questions like \u201ctell me what you like most about the software (or what you dislike the most\u201d. Ask open ended questions and take notes \u2013 take lot\u2019s of notes. After\u00a0 you\u2019ve talked to a good sample of customers, break the notes into individual comments and start sticking them on a wall. Look for affinity \u2013 start grouping items and looking for themes. Then, see if an ility aligns with a theme. Eventually, you\u2019ll have a bunch of big fat quality bulls-eyes on the wall waiting for you to address.<\/p>\n

I have one minor nit where Adam missed the mark \u2013 you don\u2019t have to wait until v1 is out to collect this data. If your software team is worth their salt, they\u2019ve defined the customer segments they care about far before v1 hits the street. Interview customers from that segment and ask them questions like \u201cthis product does foo, what do you expect a high quality product that does foo to do?\u201d, or \u201cwhat would make you want to use a product like this?\u201d or \u201cwhat would make a product that does foo unusable for you?\u201d<\/p>\n

The fun part is that I\u2019ve sort of done this (in a very<\/span> general way), and have a list (that certainly won\u2019t work for every piece of software in the world, but is worth discussing). I haven\u2019t yet figured out how to push the dial on these ilities, but but that\u2019s what I\u2019m going to try and figure out \u2013 using this blog as a sounding board while I think.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Leave it to Adam Goucher to beat me to the punch line. When I proposed that breaking down your definition of quality to a manageable set of ilities is a reasonable method for improving customer perceived quality, the logical next step is to try and find out which of the ilities you need to care…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allposts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}