Vegetables, Quality Assurance and Software Development

This is actually a repeat of my older post from my old blog. But it is summer again, so why not?

Here in Ukraine you can more and more often hear people asking "How were they grown?" when they buy some vegetables. Especially when they are going to buy early vegetables that are difficult if at all possible cultivate by "usual" process and get harvest this early. What this essentially means is that people are interested in the process used to achieve the result. Why they would want to know that? Because this helps customers evaluate quality of the product. It helps customers understand internal characteristics of the product they are about to buy. And here not only the process or quality assurance procedures itself matter but also the ability to effectively communicate benefits of the process to win customers' trust is important.

The same thing happens with software development. We want to build trust relationships with our customers. But this means that we have to give them a look at what is going inside, we have to provide transparency for the customers. It is extremely difficult and sometimes very inefficient to build trust without transparency. So think twice before replying to customer's "How are you going to achieve this result?" with "Just trust us. We will do it."

More on this topic in David Anderson's post "No Trust without Transparency".