Redefining Software Quality

I think it's interesting to place "Useful" at the 4th level of the pyramid, above functional, performant/secure, and usable. The author themself writes "Usability marks potential, and if nobody is using it do we care?" - and why would anyone use it if it's not useful?

Personally I would reorder this with Useful at the bottom, then Functional, then Usable. It doesn't even need to work for you to ask people, "If you had a magic button that you could do this thing for you, would you want it?" Maybe this is edging towards "Product Quality" rather than "Software Quality", but I think the two are intertwined.

It is an interesting view on software quality, but I think software quality is really multi dimensional (while the pyramid has only one - up and down). Internal quality can't be ignored. Without good internal quality you can't even achieve the first level for a longer period.

I like but I'd want a stance/definitions that also encompass what the newcomers are to experience as they onboard. Will the software quality be as high for the next person as it is now? How are they going to climb these steps?

Quality is not an easy thing to define, you can’t point at something and say, “that’s a quality”, there’s no thing that represents quality, like how you could say a compass would represent the word “direction”.

When pushed, we generally talk about quality products, usually high end cars like Porsche, Mercedes or Audi. We think of these as quality products because people are willing to pay large amounts for them. Their customers like the product enough to part with their hard earned cash.

However, If you agree with the agile manifesto, then "working software is the primary measure of progress", I think that gives the "zen-like sentence" you're talking about.

To help make it easier to understand, you can break down "working software" into two parts:

1. Objective, from a craftsmanship perspective, you can measure code coverage, performance and bugs.

2. Subjective, from a customer perspective, Does it meet their expectations? Is it useful, and secure? What are they comparing it to?

Hopefully you'll find this is easier to use than another pyramid.