What a Quality Manager Taught Me About Software

Before I wrote software for a living, I ran quality on a factory floor.

From 2002 to 2005 I was the Quality Assurance Manager at Premium Leisure Spas. From 2005 to 2008 I held the same job at Tatum Manufacturing. My job was not to inspect parts myself. My job was to decide what "good" meant, write it down, and build the system that checked every product against it.

Write the standard down

At both plants we ran ISO 9000, and we held the plant at 99 percent compliance. ISO 9000 is not magic. It asks a simple question over and over: can you show me where you wrote down how this is done, and can you show me proof that it was done that way?

So I built a library of standard procedures. Each one said what the job was, how to do it, and how to check it. When a procedure was wrong, we fixed the procedure, not just the part.

I write software the same way. Before I build a site, I write down what the client asked for, one line per requirement. That list is the standard.

Check against the standard, not against your hopes

On the floor, I managed the inspectors, the auditors and document control. The rule I gave them was simple: you do not pass a product because it looks fine. You pass it because you checked each point on the list and each point is true.

Software has the same trap. A page can look finished and still be wrong. A form can look right and still send the email to the wrong person. So at the end of a build, I go back to the list. Each line gets checked on the real site, not on my laptop, and not from memory.

Done means checked

The habit I value most from those years is this one: a thing is not done when I finish it. It is done when I have checked it.

That habit costs a little time at the end of every job. It saves much more time later, because the client finds a working site, not a list of surprises.

Where this shows up now

Every site and app I build today goes through the same steps: write the standard, build to it, check each line on the live site. If you want to see what that looks like on real work, the work page on sbarron.com shows live client sites with the client's own review beside each one.

A factory taught me that quality is not a feeling at the end of a job. It is a system you build at the start.