[continued from What Quality is Not]

Keep Looking Up

It is rare that anyone would deliberately ship a shoddy product or knowingly provide a poor service. However, this does happen for a number of reasons. Some of these include limited funding, lack of time, and insufficient talent, which cannot be remedied directly by attitude. On the other hand, sometimes the problem is with perception and awareness, or just a failure to pay attention to detail.

I make the assumption that, as [software developers] who have read this far, you are interested in improving product quality and, therefore, probably already have products that are fairly high on that scale. Nevertheless, we can all improve, and it is important to take the attitude that even the little things make a difference. We need to listen to our users and reviewers closely and resist the natural temptation to dismiss or rationalize criticism. All comments are valid, whether or not they are accurate, and we must pay attention as they tell us where we can yet improve.
Simply by taking the attitude that quality is important and that knowingly providing less than our best for our customers is unacceptable, we can improve both our products and our bottom lines.

Gregg Seelhoff is an independent game developer who serve[d] on the ASP Board of Directors. He can be reached at seelhoff@sophsoft.com.

[end of article]