Application Quality
The application quality is not the same as the code quality. Both quality levels are downgraded by bugs in the application, but the code quality emphasizes the developers ability to quickly resolve bugs, and more importantly, implement new features. The application quality refers to the customer’s opinion of the software. The customer’s opinion of the existing software will likely affect subsequent development on the solution, because when the customer’s opinion of some aspects of the software is poor there will be pressure to resolve those issues and that will determine the priority of future development. Customers will be dissatisfied with the solution if it has a lot of bugs or if there are bugs with significant impact, but they may also be dissatisfied if it is slow, difficult to understand and use, insecure, difficult to implement and configure, or unreliable. To address the causes of these problems teams may need to add emphasis on improving DevOps, or implement coding practices such as pair programming at TDD that may increase quality. Perhaps teams need to improve requirements gathering to implement the features customers desire. Poor application quality can lead to changes in a lot of other elements in an attempt to remedy the problems and perceptions.