A software conference that advocates for quality

I think I’ve finally figured out just what is that annoys me about the “software quality” crowd.

Quality is a measurement. That’s how it works in hardware land, anyway. Product defects - and, crucially, their associated cost to the company - are quantified

Quality is not some abstract, feel good concept like “developer experience”. It’s a real, hard number of how much money the company loses to product defects.

Almost every professional software developer I’ve ever met is completely and vehemently opposed to any part of their workflow being quantified. It’s dismissed as “micromanagement” and “bean counting”.

Bruh. You can’t talk about quality with any seriousness while simultaneously refusing metrics. Those two points are antithetical to one another.

I notice you have not quantified any aspect of your opinion, here. Which is not surprising, since your opinion is unrelated to facts, science, experience, or wisdom.

Quality is not a "real, hard number" because such a thing would depend entirely on how you collect the data, what you count as data, and how you interpret the data. All of this is brimming with controversy, as you might know if you had read more than zero books about qualitative research, epistemology, the philosophy, history, or practice of science. I say "might" because of course, the number of books one reads is no measure of wisdom. It is one indicator of an interest to learn, though.

It would be nice if you had learned, in your years on Earth, that you can't talk about quality with any seriousness while simultaneously refusing to accept that quality is about people, relationships, and feelings. It's about risks and interpretations of risk.

Now, here is the part where I agree with you: quality is assessed, not measured. But that assessment is based on evidence, and one kind of evidence is stuff that can be usefully measured.

While there is no such thing as a "qualitometer," we should not be automatically opposed to measuring things that may help us and not hurt us.