Quantity over Quality!...What?

You might be wondering that, in the title I wrote Quantity over Quality by mistake but believe me it isn’t by mistake. Although, it’s against the most popular belief Quality over Quantity, but that’s how it is in most of the cases. Let’s see how it is.

I just read a wonderful article at coding horror in which he quoted a rather insightful anecdote originally from the book Art and fear. The anecdote was:

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”.

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

Although it might be clear from the quoted text above but it needs saying again that “Quantity always trumps the quality” and why is it so? It’s because of the fact that you can’t develop a masterpiece of yours in the first attempt. If you think you can do it in one iteration, I doubt that. And the reason is, you have to go through a series of polishing steps to get to the point when you can develop a product and say that it’s the one of it’s kind and it can’t get any better.

Let’s say you develop some product in one iteration and you say it’s the one of it’s kind and, for a moment, let’s say it truly is the best. Even then you shouldn’t be content to that, and the reason is you should consider the fact that if you can develop the best in one iteration, how better can it be in a series of iterations where you’ll be cycling in a motion of making mistakes and learning from them and by each iteration not only you’ll be gaining knowledge but also you’ll be getting to the point where you’ll be developing a quality product.

You can keep thinking and thinking about whether you are doing it the right way or the wrong one, but believe me you are never going to know you are doing it the right way or the wrong one, unless you try. It was Thomas Edison, who once said:

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work

I do believe in the fact that Quantity does trump the quality and I hope you’d be agreed with me by now.