How quality degrades

I by no means assume the following does not fall into some sort of logical pit along the way, but I hope my idea will be conveyed anyway.

On a layered architecture each level has its individual degree of quality, but the total quality is not a sum over the parts but more like a multiplication over them, meaning that adding a top quality layer does not improve the whole (if not makes it any worse, either) and adding a less-than-perfect one will drag the total quality down somewhat. Adding quality would actually mean fixing a bug in another layer, which is not a good idea to do anyway. The whole can be as bad as the worst part within it.

What does that mean, then?

This week I took my first run on a web-based service for creating, editing and publishing video content. All the pain of being able to produce a nice enough, coherent and clearly voiced material aside, I also ran into some problems with the tool itself. I do not know if the service itself had occasionally some trouble handling all the traffic, or was my network connection bad somehow (the office WAN connection is known to have latency issues), or was it the fault of the browser (tried both IE and Firefox, though). Nevertheless I ended up logging in and out and restarting the browser and lost two good audio takes due to all that, which is not adding any glory for the service or its provider.

How are regular users seeing that kind of things?  They point at the service provider and say "your service is not good" as they do not see the different pieces in the whole. Is the service provider at fault? Many times that might not be the case. Does the reputation of the service provider take hit? Yes. Does it take the user support person a great amount of patience to get through the idea that the service provider does not (and can not) be responsible in any way of what there is between the user and their network? Most likely yes.



Thus, it is really important to ensure top quality all over the stack, and also beware of the pitfalls of having your product being stacked with layers you have no control over, since it may affect your brand. There are of course ways to protect against things like network twitches etc by properly handling all error conditions and taking care of handling communication time-outs gracefully - all signs of good quality software!