'What Makes Software High-Quality?'
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 6th May 2008 15:15 UTC, submitted by Shlomi Fish
Features, Office "Which parameters make software applications high-quality? And which parameters or methods, while desirable, are not directly 'quality'?" This is the question the author of this article asks himself. Most of his 'parameters' make a lot of sense, but be aware that the article is about what makes an open source program high quality, and not programs in general. This important bit is stated in the one-sentence 'abstract'.
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Comment by ahoogerhuis
by ahoogerhuis on Tue 6th May 2008 17:18 UTC
ahoogerhuis
Member since:
2008-05-06

Postfix is a great example of something that is high quality. It does what it does exceedingly well, and it's simple to set up for most scenarios, and once you start it it will run for donkey's years.

Same with BIND, PostgreSQL, OpenSSH, OpenVPN, likely a good few other open source products.

And to include something for the Windows users, PuTTY and VMware Workstation are good examples of stuff that "just works".

-A

Reply Score: 1

RE: Comment by ahoogerhuis
by FunkyELF on Tue 6th May 2008 17:36 in reply to "Comment by ahoogerhuis"
FunkyELF Member since:
2006-07-26

Postfix is a great example of something that is high quality. It does what it does exceedingly well, and it's simple to set up for most scenarios, and once you start it it will run for donkey's years.

Same with BIND, PostgreSQL, OpenSSH, OpenVPN, likely a good few other open source products.

And to include something for the Windows users, PuTTY and VMware Workstation are good examples of stuff that "just works".

-A


By that same token, calc.exe, mspaint.exe and notepad all do what they do really well and they just work. Never had a problem with them. But they do next to nothing. Notepad can't even open text files that don't have their \n's followed by \r's.

There needs to be more factors like how much it can do. But you go too far and your software is bloated.

Reply Parent Score: 4

ahoogerhuis Member since:
2008-05-06

You overlooked "It does what it does exceedingly well".

mspaint.exe doesn't do it well as in functionally well. That's called Gimp, Photoshop or similar. Now, if you look at my examples you'll fint postfix to be an exceedingly functional SMTP server, and so on for the others in their fields.

-A

Reply Parent Score: 1