Imagine you’re at one of those quick-serve restaurants where you move from station to station adding ingredients to your final dish. Each part of your meal is a separate ingredient that comes together at the end of the line. Once you get to the end of the line, you might ask for a condiment to enhance the dish. But there is no condiment called “quality.” If there were, everyone would order their dish with extra quality at the end. Just drown it in quality! This is exactly what many organizations are doing with their quality strategy.
Lots of companies have a dedicated quality assurance (QA) team that’s responsible for ensuring that you’re producing a quality product. But the quality of the product can’t exist in itself. Overall quality comprises the quality of all the individual ingredients. If you’re not checking the quality of the ingredients, the quality of the final product can be only so good. Quality is not a condiment. Not in restaurants, and not in software development.