I am not sure about the quality of software I delivered?

This is what I got to hear from average software developers across many workshop sessions that I have been undertaking recently in India.

Ask a software developer (on an average) if he could make out whether he has delivered a piece of high quality code for required functionality, and the answer that may be expected is YES.

The second question that you ask is “How do they know that they delivered a high quality piece of code?”. The answer you get is related with defects primarily against the functional requirements. All they say is that their piece of code has not been found with any bug in Dev/QA/UAT & production environment and hence, they are confident of high quality.

Following are some of the areas which were mentioned by software developers, that they consider while thinking about software quality:

1. As less defects as possible
2. Efficient: UI takes less time to load; Note that they tend to ignore about resource utilization aspect
3. Secured

Very less number of developers (on average) were found to consider the non-functional aspects such as following:

1. Reliability: The ability of software to recover; The ability of software to fail gracefully; resilience
2. Operability: Ease of understandability & learnability of software; May also be termed as usability
3. Maintainability: Whethar the software (source code) is maintainable or not;
4. Compatibility: Whethar the software can be integrated with other software systems
5. Portability: Whethar software can be installed and configure on multiple environments

Average software developers were also found to be unaware of some of the following terminologies:

1. Technical debt
2. Code refactoring
3. Code complexity
4. Test coverage
5. Rules compliance
6. Class/method cohesiveness