Is high quality software worth the cost? cover image
Agile Engineering

Is high quality software worth the cost?

We usually perceive that it costs more to get higher quality, but software internal quality actually reduces costs.

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Martin Fowler
May 29, 2019 • 14 min read
4.62 (13)
Quality-Driven development
Cost of Quality
User Interface Design (UI)
Customer Experience
Software as a service (SaaS)
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Summary

The trade-off between quality and cost is that it costs more to deliver a quality product or service. However, this is not the case when it comes to software development. The quality of software lies in its internal code architecture than the external features. The better the internal code is divided and structured in modules, the easier it is to modify and fix for a programmer. But poorly structured software contains some degree of complexity called cruft that makes it costly to add more features and fix. Learn what software quality means, its importance, and its impacts on developers, users, and customers in this article.

Takeaways

  • It is cheaper to produce and maintain high quality software, developers spend less time fixing the internal code architecture as compared to poorly structured software that contains cruft.
  • The quality of software depends on the structure of the internal codebase than the interface.
  • Users and customers only see the external quality of software but cannot tell the difference between higher or lower internal quality software.

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