My current interest (or obsession?) is the role of standards in testing. As part of my work on that I’ve been thinking about quality. Here is the first of two articles about the nature of quality. I believe that it’s helpful to understand what quality is if we are to think constructively about the role of standards.

The second article goes on to explain how traditional development methods and standards, their close cousin, had fundamental problems that meant that their commitment to quality was no more than marketing gloss, designed to appeal to senior managers rather than to produce high quality applications.