Link: Notes on software quality
It is hard to have software quality at large scales. As companies grow, the friction associated with quality increases.
This article also gives some small ways to improve UX design at the end.
Personal Opinion
I think that quality is practically impossible to achieve when it comes to large companies, but I think that it’s still possible with open source. Take Blender for example. I would consider Blender to be a large scale open source product. It’s used by a lot of people and has a ton of features, but it still competes with proprietary software like Maya. I’ve even heard from a friend that Blender beats Maya in many aspects (though I haven’t experienced it myself).
I think the reason that open source can still be high quality is that it resolves many of the points that the article brings up. If there’s a bug that affects 0.02% of the users, one of those 0.02% of the users can do something about it, like write a PR. And people that are passionate about building high quality software and tooling can contribute without pressure to “release a feature”, since money isn’t involved. Apparently there are some features in Blender that are basically, “some random person felt very strongly about X and made a full system to do it, now anyone that wants to can”. Basically, because open source is less about making a profit, there’s less pressure to ship faster.
Of course, that’s not to say it’s the silver bullet. There’s still problems with finding maintainers, reviewing issues and PRs, building a culture of quality, etc. But I think it’s much more possible in open source than in a corporate environment.