What is quality and how do we judge the quality of something?

Quality is the conformance to the required standards, means that there should be minimum difference in actual quality criterias and the claimed one's.

Quality criterias can be numerous like weight, purity of ingredients, volume, texture, stiffness, crispiness, promptness, reliability etc depending on product or service.

Premium brands sometime also reffered as quality brands have higher quality parameters to met. like premium brands in diary may have higher amount of milk fat/ cream as compared to standard products and just like that; these may have only omega3 fatty acids and more nutritious alternatives to staandard ones.

As a customer we judge quality by most of the time by visual means, appearence, color, aesthetic value and by texture and taste / smell or flavour.

But professionally we have set quality attributes to measure like amount of fat, carbohydrates, mineral contents, moisture, trans fatty acids, amount of enzymes aur microbial count either specific aur general TPC. Aur gaol of analysis is to evaluate, extent to which observed quality parameters are equal to stated/claimed or regulatory parameters.

ISO9000 defines Quality as the: " the degree to which a set of inherent characterstics fullfills requiremnets".

Many people confuse "Grade" or Product Class" with Quality.

Suppliers provide different product grades based on their target customers. Not all of us can afford a Mont Blanc pen, most of us use Bic Pen.

You can't compare Mont Blanc to Bic, its apples and oranges.

but you can compare2 prodcust within the same grade. by seeing who has the low cost, better time and better characerstics.

Quality is simply how much variation is their in your product or process.

if you can always acheive the same results, then this indicates that your process is under control.

for example if you are producing Coke, and you always have350ml +-2ml. this is an indication of quality.

there are8 dimesnions of quality, to judege the product of quality: Performance, Features, Reliability,  Conformance, Durability, Serviceability, Aesthetics, and Perceived Quality by customers and the public.

Quality depends manily on its product  effeciency in to the market. All we need is a product which can satisfy the market. Every product in the market ( Let it be Software or other ) is not a100% bug free but quality assuance team makes sure that before it goes to production it should be able to full fill the customer  needs.

In simple  terms quality is to make sure that there no major issues when delivered to the customers. 

Measuring the products quality reflects on how well it complies with the given design, requiremnets, functionality. And also compares to the competitors product.