Comment by femto
3 days ago
It can depend on the application/niche.
I used to write signal processing software for land mobile radios. Those radios were used by emergency services. For the most part, our software was high quality in that it gave good quality audio and rarely had problems. If it did have a problem, it would recover quickly enough that the customer would not notice.
Our radios got a name for reliability: such as feedback from customers about skyscrapers in New York being on fire and the radios not skipping a beat during the emergency response. Word of mouth traveled in a relatively close knit community and the "quality" did win customers.
Oddly we didn't have explicit procedures to maintain that quality. The key in my mind was that we had enough time in the day to address the root cause of bugs, it was a small enough team that we knew what was going into the repository and its effect on the system, and we developed incrementally. A few years later, we got spread thinner onto more products and it didn't work so well.
Which skyscrapers (plural)? Fires in NYC high-rise buildings are incredibly rare in the last 20 years.
Don't know. The customer ran a radio network which was used by fire brigade(s?) in NY, so we weren't on the "coal face". It was about 15 years ago.
It was an interesting job. Among other things, our gear ran stage management for a couple of Olympic opening ceremonies. Reliability was key given the size of the audience. We also did gear for the USGC, covering the entire US coastline. If you placed an emergency call at sea, it was our radios that were receiving that signal and passing it into the USCG's network.