For day 19 of 30 Days of Quality we’re asked to:
Read and share your thoughts on Principle 5 of Modern Testing
Principle 5 is
We believe that the customer is the only one capable to judge and evaluate the quality of our product.
What are your thoughts on this?
Hi Everyone!
My notion of the principle #5 “We believe that the customer is the only one capable to judge and evaluate the quality of our product” as follows.
It’s crucial to understand what makes customers happier and solve their needs. In most cases they’re interested not in the software we’re building but their problems to be solved. Hence we should all be on our guard not to get too excited about our product and start doing the work which we shouldn’t be doing, work which not help us to achieve the customer’s goal.
So how we can test our hypothesis here? We need to find out customers’ priority to make the software better. Sometimes customers care about bugs and sometimes not. Thus sometimes we may need to sacrifice quality by delivering value.
We need to have input about what customer problem we’re solving and drive our team that direction. In other words, we need to continuously recenter the team around solving customer needs.
Well, our software is for our costumers right? 
We have to have in mind our client’s problems in order to improve our features and verify if those problems are being addressed. Clients play a major role, and it is important that the entire team is aware of what they need , as to have context which is usually underated.
Putting on top what clients need the most is important as you mention too @valeriiai
We need to find out customers’ priority to make the software better.
Based on my experience this is a bit superficial. Besides the customers wishes there are also laws and regulations. These need to be covered as well. Our customers aren’t very technical so things regarding encryption, data protection and web security are not something all of them are concerned about. We still need to make our software secure even if it’s not a nice visible feature. And that could mean postponing something else with more obvious value. So this principle assumes that our customers are all knowing.