Software Quality Goals

The six quality goals are never fully achieved in production software and serve as essential targets to approach continuously rather than fixed endpoints. Every fix must be evaluated against six core quality goals, and any code that compromises one or more of them incurs technical debt. Reliability requires software to perform its functions accurately and recover gracefully from failures without requiring user intervention. Scalability requires software architecture designed to accommodate growth without requiring a fundamental rewrite. Security requires using encryption for sensitive data, implementing authentication when needed, and applying regular security updates. Maintainability requires a codebase understandable to a developer reading it without prior specialized knowledge. Efficiency requires the interface to never appear frozen or unresponsive during heavy background processing.