Qualifying Quality Vs Winning Quality

It all depends on the market we are competing. If we are dealing with a highly competitive market where the requirements are driven by the customers then we will have to find non conventional ways to make them 'very' happy. However before we make them very happy we need to make sure that our solutions at least can do the job for them. Even though we have done all the due diligence to get their requirements working its does not mean that customers are 'very' happy about the solution. This is the difference between winning quality and qualifying quality. Just take a look at the following illustration which was copied from internet.

Source Unknown

This exactly what we should be doing as quality engineering. Conventional schools will teach us to meet the customer requirement which may be in the form of either user stories or requirement specification documents.

However we need to think more forward than that. When we think this from testing angle then we would always try to compare the test against something. Thats natural. However what makes the product winning will not certainly in our 'testing' scope. So the challenge is how we can make it part of testing? or do we really want to worry about it? let something else worry about it. Just look at the following table and see whether we can take any learning from that.

So we can test these winning characteristics in the software we build? I think we must leverage the retrospectives defined in Agile for this purpose. The best way to understand whether our customer is happy or delighted is from their feedback. Hence the retrospectives are very important. However in the meantime we need to identify the winning criteria of the customer through their feedback and include them in our solutions and verify later via the testing process. I think this is the most convenient way to understand the winning quality of the customer.

So we must always think that what we test will not essentially keep the customer with us. And the best way to understand whether we are making them delighted is the retrospective which would give us their real time feedback.