Software quality is often treated as an elusive and mysterious goal. Everybody wishes to have it and the strategies for achieving quality are as varied as the companies that claim it. Interestingly enough, very few people are able to provide a clear statement of what software quality is. In my humble opinion this is the crux of the problem, how can a goal be achieved which isn’t clearly defined? There are actually a multitude of software quality definitions that can be found. As so often, Wikipedia provides an interesting starting point for study. The pragmatic difficulty with many definitions of quality is that they are qualitative descriptions and are strongly dependent on the observer’s viewpoint. A pragmatically useful definition of software quality must be objective, reproducible and must deliver quantitative results.