I recently read Let My People Go Surfing by Yvon Chouinard, the founder and owner of Patagonia.  As an avid surfer and founder myself, I was interested to hear more about Yvon and how his philosophies have helped him create one of the most inspiring and authentic clothing brands out there.

I was surprised by the number of parallels between Patagonia’s philosophy of creation and our own here at Artium.  Both are fundamentally rooted in a desire to create purpose-built, high quality products through dedication to principles and craft.  With a dedication to authenticity and purity of form and function that I suspect comes at least partially from surfing.

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The Product Design Philosophy section inspired me to write our own list of criteria for high quality software, as well as a list of fundamental practices we will almost always use to achieve them, which I titled “Artium Philosophies: Quality in Software”.

Below is a list of those criteria and practices with all the detail stripped out.

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At Artium we believe that high quality software possess the following attributes:

1. Achieves the Business Goal
2. Operable
3. Changeable
4. Beautiful & Emotional
5. Learnable Code Base
6. Scalable
7. Compliant
8. Secure
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And in order to achieve those attributes we will most often employ the following practices, in addition to many others:

1. Test Driven Development
2. Pair Programming
3. User Research
4. Infrastructure Automation
5. Prioritized Backlog
6. Product Roadmap
7. Daily Stakeholder Updates
8. Retrospectives

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In conclusion, it’s a very inspiring book for any current or aspiring entrepreneur.  And an important reminder that successfully building a business is about more than just money.

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-Ross Hale, Artium CEO