Software Quality, Leprechauns, and Other Myths and Legends

by Carol A. Dekkers

As an invited speaker to last week's International Conference on Software Quality (10ICSQ) hosted by the Software Division of the American Society for Quality in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, I had the good fortune to listen to Dr. Chuck Engle, whose topic is the title of this week's Advisor. Through a mixture of humor and hard facts, Engle introduced attendees to the core reasons that software quality is so elusive and gave us food for thought about solutions that may enable us to better address software quality in our own organizations. Engle suggested that part of our industry's (and society's) issues with software quality center around the often unrealistic expectations we set for software quality. One of the things I believe our industry does extremely well is pass along good ideas when we hear them, and although Dr. Engle did not solve the quality problem in 90 minutes, his presentation had some great insights. I'd like to share them so that you, too, can benefit from his presentation.