If you haven’t been intimately involved in an application development project, this question probably evokes some puzzlement. You ship your software when it’s done, right? Well, maybe. There are a number of considerations that you take into account when deciding when to ship an application—is the coding complete, is the quality there, and is the business ready?
The developers are responsible for determining when coding is complete, while the business owners have to determine if the application is ready to increase revenue or reduce costs.
I’m interested in focusing on the second aspect—the assessment of application quality. We can point to things like defect rate or requirements met as shipping criteria, but those are still ambiguous terms. Any application is going to have defects, and some requirements will be met better than others.
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