NDC 2010 was great. This post is inspired by Tom Gilbs ”Lean quality assurance” talk:
Often we set out to build high quality software without really considering what that entails. How can you really know, when project has finished, that you have created quality software?
Clean code, test coverage and executable specifications created iteratively together with the primary stakeholders seem to be the main focus for most agile projects, at least, in agile theory. There are other concerns that can easily be overlooked when people go into “agile mode”.
Numeric entry and exit
As a stakeholder in a project you don’t really care about testing and executable specifications. You care about the ilities. Usability, Maintainability, Reliability, Security and Scalability are some that come to mind. Often requirements emerge as the software is developed, but many of these are well known in advance, at least to the stakeholders.
How can we identify these requirements and ensure that they are met at the end of the project?
A coder will leave it to chance. A software engineer will measure and verify that the requirements are met.
To identify the requirements you first need to identify the stakeholders. This is a process in its own right. Later you can start identifying the requirements.
According to Tom Gilb you can measure *any* requirement numerically. Later in the process you can use these numbers to evaluate the quality of the software (or some other item) you are producing. A requirement is considered done when your software meets the numeric target for that requirement. “Numeric entry and exit” is a term that describes this way of thinking. 
How can you measure things like usability of a feature? The answer is obviously “it depends”. One metric can be the percentage of grandmothers that understand the feature on the first try. If 80% get it, you have a usable product, and you have met your target for that specific requirement.
Obviously dissecting your requirements this way requires a lot of time and effort. For some projects doing it this way makes no sense, for some it’s too cumbersome and expensive, and for some it totally makes sense.
You get what you measure
Later.
