No quality without equality

Quality control mechanisms play an important role in improving software quality. However, quality improvement requires us to customize and calibrate these mechanisms to particular development environments. To do this, managers must understand how quality mechanisms affect developers and, in turn, how developers and their perspectives affect quality mechanisms. Otherwise, calibration and improvement are uncontrolled. Managers must recognize that software developers do not form a homogeneous group. Different developers may have different thoughts about and reactions to the use of formal quality mechanisms, which makes optimizing quality control a tricky business. Indeed, developers may have significantly different views of what quality itself means. To implement effective quality-control tools and practices, managers must understand these different developer attitudes. When differentiating types of developers, we often classify them in terms of their experience with different domains, languages, tools, and practices. My research reveals that we may want to look also at the differences in attitudes between men and women