I thought about the term “good enough” lately. It came into my mind, that the term is used in a kind of way which is misleading.
In a lot of books about quality and economics (books which deal with the combination of the two) it is written, that development should not be perfect, because it is economically not meaningful, but it should be good enough. The hint is right, but misleading. It is not explained in detail what ‘goo enough’ really means, at least not in the books I wrote about that topic.
The term good enough is treated in almost all cases I witnessed as: Good enough = Good enough to be sell-able. This leads to a focus on external design, usability and feature bloat to increase market value. The market value in most cases is only judged by the external attributes. Most buyers do not look into the products and judge the internal value, what in most cases also would not make much sense. That’s why colorful products, well-designed and products with a ton of features can be sold best.
There is nothing wrong about the fact that such products can be sold best and most easy, but from the business point of view, this is not enough. What is good enough for the end customer, is not necessarily good enough for the producer of the product. All products have more needs than just to be sell-able. Products need to be recyclable, maintainable, ecological and maybe also upgradable (and much more). These thoughts lead to the conclusion, that there is more to think about than just the market and to be good enough for the market.
In software industry for instance, the source code of a current product is used as foundation for all further products. As soon as the source base gets unmaintainable, all future products are in danger. Software is very complex to develop and therefore, very expensive. A complete new development of a source base of a product family is very expensive and only large companies can handle and survive that.
It is therefore very important, right from the beginning, to spend some effort on code quality. The application of metrics, defect checks and conventions is crucial. Otherwise, the future of a company can be in danger.