Hi everyone 
During TestBash Careers yesterday, our community members suggested a few questions you can encounter when attending an interview.
As these questions will need answers, I thought: ‘what better place to ask them than at The Club?’
I’ll be creating a series of posts, one for each of the questions raised by the community, and open the discussion for you all to contribute with your thoughts and together help our fellow community members who are looking to interview (both interviewee and interviewer).
Question #2 - What is Quality?
- How would you answer this in an interview?
- If you don’t know the answer, how would you tell your interviewer you don’t actually know the answer?
- How might you reframe this question if you were to ask this as an interviewer?
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I’d rarely expect a straight forward answer on this as its a pretty complex concept, if I’m on a new project its usually a number of discussions to nail down and get the team aligned on what quality means in the context of that project.
Usually we’d talk about it in terms of the level of value the product offers to its different stakeholders. The different stakeholders is an important aspect so I’d expect an interviewee to mention that, for an app seller his main value might be to make money so for them if it does not do that its low quality, for a user often the more it meets their needs the higher quality it is.
Its never just one thing or characteristic but understanding a product can be both high and low quality at the exact same time is quite a tough interview discussion.
Measuring it is also tough, high quality products often make people happy but then how do we measure happiness, 5 stars perhaps but then that can be rigged.
In software we can often break things down into characteristics that are abstract contributors to quality, so you can discuss ilities like performance, security, accessibility, usability, intuitive, maintain, testability so these could be part of the discussion.
What are the top three goals for the product are another angle to look at this, increase market share by 20%, if that’s the goal it can also be a contributing factor to establishing what quality means in current context and measuring quality.
I might reframe the discussion, tell me about two products, one you regard as high quality and the other you regard as low quality and explain why you regard them differently?