November 04, 2005 - Open Quality Recognized
Kevin Rutherford, on his blog Silk and Spinach describes our open quality initiative and hits the nail right on the head.We hope and expect that companies that buy software will over time demand this type of transparency from their providers. But as Kevin correctly observes the bigger benefit is for the software vendor that practices open quality, even though it may at times be unsettling.
At Agitar we have had times in our own product development cycle where the numbers did not look as good as we wished them to. And the thought of focusing on the features and not the quality did enter our minds. But the thought of the dashboards that would publicly expose the deteriorating results did always drive us back to doing the right thing. We know that in the end we always win by doing the right thing — the dashboards just make sure we do not forget.
The best thing we get in return for being open about our quality is trust from our customers. Customer trust is very valuable and can be measured in renewal sales and lack of defections. It makes being open a smart business decision.
The fact that Kevin trusts us too (stating that he is sure that Agitar is not manipulating the data in the dashboards) even more convinces me that transparency is a good thing. In the anonymous universe that is the internet, gaining someone's trust is extremely hard. How did we gain Kevin's trust? Open Quality!
Posted by Mark DeVisser at November 4, 2005 12:24 PM
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Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Open Quality Recognized:
» open quality - revisited from silk and spinach
In Open Quality Recognized Mark DeVisser adds to my discussion of Agitar's Open Quality initiative. Has anyone else out there taken up the challenge?... [Read More]
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» open quality from silk and spinach
Agitar are now publishing a "dashboard" showing their internal code quality metrics [Read More]
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Comments
The open "code quality" idea is just the usual open project concept, or massive peer review, or whatever we wish to call it this week, applied very directly to code quality, isn't it? Whether there can be a single ethic of open quality that applies to all such products, though, I wonder about.
Posted by: Craig Hubley on December 1, 2005 11:01 AM
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