High-Quality Software: What Is It and Why Is It Worth It?

As a software engineer, I’ve seen too many projects whether built by full teams, multiple developers, or even just one person turn into an absolute mess. And I swear, 80% of the time, they should come with a warning for whoever has to update the code next. Something like this:

If you hang around developers, whether it’s friends, coworkers, or Reddit threads, you’ll notice a common theme: complaints about bad code and debates over the best (or worst) ways to manage software projects.

The sad reality is that most solo developers and full teams have to deal with short, or not properly defined deadlines, which often means sacrificing code quality, documentation, and proper architecture. This results in large, messy codebases that make life harder for anyone maintaining them in the future.

What Is High-Quality Software?

There’s no single definition for high-quality software. Some might say it means well-named functions and variables, no stray console logs, and clean readability. Others may argue it’s about thorough testing and easy maintenance. A few will insist it’s about minimizing bugs and having solid test coverage.

In reality, all of these points matter. But high-quality software isn’t just about one or two of them—it’s a combination of many factors. Let’s break it down.

1. Planning and Documentation

For medium to large projects, having proper documentation is crucial. At a minimum, these documents help set expectations, outline requirements, and provide a roadmap for development:

• Software Development Plan (SDP): Covers the base requirements, expected outcome, roadmap, and potential details about the development team.
• Functional Requirements Document (FRD): Lists system features, expectations, limitations, and testing criteria.
• Software Requirements Specification (SRS): Defines high-level project goals, end-user needs, and technical constraints.
• Technical Design Document (TDD): Details the architecture, interfaces, coding standards, data models, API endpoints, and system design.

Most teams require at least the SDP and TDD, while the FRD and SRS may overlap with them. These documents ensure the entire team understands what’s expected and agreed upon with clients or internal stakeholders.

2. Development Process

There are countless ways to improve software quality, but some of the easiest (and most ignored) best practices include:

• Following naming conventions as defined in the TDD.
• Modularizing functionalities for better reusability.
• Prioritizing code readability to make maintenance easier.
• Writing unit tests to ensure functionality works and won’t break with future changes.
• Adding automated tests in the repository pipeline to enforce coding standards.
• Keeping documentation updated as the system evolves.
• Managing the repository properly to avoid stale branches and ensure proper merging.
• Maintaining a clean CI/CD pipeline to automate deployments and reduce errors.
• Implementing proper error handling to improve system reliability.

These steps improve software quality and make future updates easier and faster.

3. Testing and Monitoring

Too many developers overlook testing and monitoring. Just because you think you know how the system works doesn’t mean it will behave as expected in production.

Some simple yet effective ways to handle this:

• Using Systems like Sentry to catch runtime errors.
• Setting up logging solutions for backend operations (APIs, database queries, automation).
• Configuring alerts for deployment pipelines, security threats (DDoS attacks), and unusual traffic spikes.

Why Is Software Quality Often Overlooked?

All these best practices sound straightforward, so why aren’t they always followed?

It comes down to perception, different stakeholders define software quality differently:

• End users just want a system that looks good and works.
• Product owners care about feature availability, uptime, and performance.
• Project managers focus on completing tasks on time.
• Developers need readable, maintainable, and bug-free code.

Another point that often leads to overlooking internal quality is the time/cost balance. As I’ll explain in a bit, higher internal quality is more expensive at the beginning, but it saves time and reduces costs over time. However, this long-term benefit is often not communicated or visible to non-technical stakeholders, making it easy for quality-related considerations to be left out of the planning process.

For example, teams under tight deadlines may skip documentation or testing in favor of shipping features faster. While this might seem like an efficient tradeoff in the short term, it can cause significant delays and technical debt down the road. Once the project reaches a point where maintenance becomes difficult and new features take longer to implement, the hidden cost of neglecting quality becomes painfully clear.

Why Is It Worth the Effort?

At first, taking shortcuts might seem like the faster route. But in the long run, poor internal quality slows down feature development and increases maintenance costs.

Martin Fowler explains this well in his article Is High Quality Software Worth the Cost?. He describes how poor internal quality (a.k.a. technical debt) builds up over time, making new feature development increasingly difficult.

Imagine two teams starting with the same base system:

• Team A prioritizes high internal quality—clean code, good documentation, and automated tests.
• Team B takes shortcuts to ship features quickly but accumulates technical debt.

A few months in, Team A can release new features weekly. Meanwhile, Team B is stuck trying to untangle their messy code just to release a single feature. Over time, Team A’s system became vastly superior, even if their initial development pace was slower.

Who Creates Technical Debt?

A common misconception is that technical debt results from careless coding. But even the best teams generate some amount of debt—it’s often unavoidable.

Most of the time, technical debt happens because you only realize a better approach after the system is built. This is why ongoing refactoring and maintenance are critical to keeping it under control.

Wrapping Things Up

Ensuring software quality takes extra effort upfront, but it pays off in the long run. If you need to convince someone why it matters, here’s the bottom line:

• Technical debt slows down future updates.
• Ignoring internal quality makes technical debt pile up quickly.
• All teams generate some technical debt, but better quality keeps it manageable.
• Higher quality software allows teams to focus on real progress—building features efficiently.

Investing in software quality isn’t just about “doing things right.” It’s about making future development faster, smoother, and less painful.

‍