Inc. See the permissions statement below. This article derives from a position statement prepared for the Workshop on Strategic Directions in Computing Research . There is no point in researchers clamoring for quality without justifying the payoff relative to other business concerns.
Software quality has a cost and a benefit.
There is a games segment, a hand tools segment, an industrial tools segment, a safety-critical segment, and so on. When the cost of failure is low, the incentive to invest in quality is correspondingly low. That is not to say that more quality is not uniformly better. Any process that leads to increased quality at reduced cost is progress. One can hypothesize that for each kind of software there is an ideal process toward which we are moving and that this workshop will make its contribution to that journey.