in reply to What is quality?

As a technical term quality is not a description but the concept of meeting the specification. Outside of the comparison with the spec it is meaningless. High or low quality more so.

Describing the spec you can/do work to will give a more accurate idea of what can be expected and be more useful to a potential customer than lofty, vacuous phrases. A high or stringent spec is the business.

I was an aero-engine Quality Engineer for 24 years and slept through many presentions of consulants brought in to describe/reorganise quality. The name got changed a few times, Quality Assurance, Product Assurance and back to Quality. And back to the simple fact that:

"It's the spec, stupid!"

I remember my boss ransacking the reference library for a definition of chrome. It included the phrase "beautiful sheen". Sadly, that never made it to the Quality Manual.