Quality at speed

When you browse LinkedIn, you mostly see people drone on about "AI": How it made them more productive without sacrificing quality. How they fear the pace at which things (tools) are changing and whether they can adapt to what is expected of them (by management, or self-inflicted fear from reading too much LinkedIn posts by people preaching the tool-gospel).

However, when I look at the software I'm using every day, I'm left wondering where the hell these so-called productivity and quality benefits are?

Software is getting worse, not better. Where exactly is the quality at speed?

I'll tell you where it is: nowhere, because it's a lie.

The birth of quality at speed

I first learned about the phrase "quality at speed" during an Agile Testers meetup, back in 2014-2015 (not entirely sure exactly when). I only know that it was in Veenendaal, at InfoSupport. There was a guy from Atlassian, and his talk was about the concept of "quality at speed". Atlassian claimed they were able to release more often without sacrificing quality. If you look at the state of their products today, I wonder if this still holds true, but I digress.

Back then, I was still pretty junior at testing with about 4 years work experience total, 2 years as an agile tester. I remember being pretty impressed with the concept because it sounded so nice. Who doesn't want to deliver software quicker while the quality remains? It's something you can't disagree with, on the surface.

This was the era of working agile, scrum. Focusing on team effectiveness and test automation. I still liked working with Jira back then, lmao! Because of my lack of experience I had no inner criticism towards this concept, but I do now.

Quality == speed?

Quality and speed aren't concepts you want to tie to each other. Quality and testing aren't concepts you want to tie to each other, either, for that matter.

The way I see it, the word quality is in the phrase quality at speed, but in reality it isn't. Everybody talks about quality, but no one actually delivers it. That's because you can't deliver it, no matter how fast or slow you go. Quality is a perception, in the eye of the beholder.

Quality at speed is insidious, as it's meant for the people on the creation side of things: the development team, the managers. Of course, management loves it when you go faster and do more in less time! This creates a precedent, to go faster and faster, until.....STONKS?

In the LLM era, it's extremely clear to me that this seems to be the goal. Go faster, prompt your way to a solution, vibe it, ship it. The knowledge you lose on the way? Lol, sorry about that! It's strange to me that so many individuals I held in high esteem seemed to have jumped on this train as well. Productivity is the new tech-religion, with speed as its main KPI.

Quality at speed is for the companies creating the software, and no longer for the users. And what the words quality means is that it is fast. The fact that it's speedy is the quality. Nothing else seems to matter.

This erosion of looking at quality pains me, honestly. It's extremely simplistic and harmful. Who is actively looking for problems in these speedy vibe-coded "solutions"? I bet almost no one if those "tests" can't run in a pipeline!

If you truly want quality at speed, then you should turn down the speed. Talk to users. Listen to their needs. Less vibing, more critical thinking and problem-searching.

But I'm truly speaking into the void here because the mainstream opinion almost entirely clashes with my own. My message is terrible marketing: go slower. Respect and appreciate craftsmanship. The tide is fully against my way of seeing things, and that makes me sad.

Quality is value to someone who matters. This has two sides: the internal side, and the external side. I feel like barely anyone looks at the external side any more. We're all just navel-gazing towards LLM's and want to squeeze out what they can offer us on the speed and productivity spectrum.

Whether the users have a quality experience is irrelevant. They'll use the software anyway because for a lot of apps they have no choice. Their OS, their browser, the apps they have to use for work. The enshittification, quality at speed, has permeated largely everything. The word quality is a joke now, an empty shell.

Other than on a personal level refusing to engage with the nonsensical concept of quality at speed, I have nothing to offer. No hope, no solution. Just sadness and anger for the loss of craftsmanship that seems to be all the rage right now.

Bonus

Some examples of my struggles with software:

• I have refused to update to iOS 26 because I do not want to use Liquid Glass (Liquid Ass). The UX and UI have deteriorated significantly. However, my iPhone and iPad won't leave me alone. I get a pop-up shoved in my face reminding me to update. I choose "Remind me later" because there's no option for me to turn off these pop-ups. I feel disrespected as a user, like my agency for deciding when to update to the new OS version is taken away from me.
• "AI" helpers added to so many apps I use, and they never deliver anything of value to me. They only cost me time, and bring me extra irritability. I view the quality of software that forces this onto me as worse than before.
• Overall, I constantly feel that my attention is being hoarded. Fake notifications (LinkedIn is especially horrible in this aspect), worse UX/UI on purpose to make me spend more time to reach a goal, so some manager's KPI goes up.
• I have become adept at skirting around the bullshit in software. My base assumption is now: "how is this app trying to lure me into bullshit behaviour? Where are the dark patterns?" instead of "How can this app help me?". Honestly, this is wild! My current base assumption of tech is that it's harmful, not helpful. Tech doesn't excite me any more, it horrifies me. I loathe most apps and software, and that is painful for someone who used to enjoy software and computers a lot.

Software that I still enjoy using has one thing in common: simplicity. Obsidian remains an example of software that is simple at its core (it's just a UI around Markdown files), that you can extend according to your own needs. There's no AI being shoved down my throat, and that is a breath of fresh air these days.