BonCode CEO, Jan Willem Klerkx, has a confession to make: “To be honest, I don’t care about software quality. I really don’t.”
Wait, what? Yes, you read that right!
Coming from a consultancy firm that specializes in assessing and monitoring software quality, that statement might sound a little odd. In fact, it’s precisely this conflict – between tech idealists and business realists – that motivates us to do what we do every day.
The reality: quality is contextual
Software quality doesn’t matter until it gets in the way of your business. If your product can’t scale, if it slows down delivery, if you can’t onboard developers because the codebase is toxic – you have a quality problem. Until that point, nobody really cares about quality.
Here’s a good analogy: imagine you own a fast car (or maybe you don’t have to?). The police clocking you at 130 km/h isn’t the issue. It’s whether you’re doing it on the autosnelweg or through a sleepy village on Sunday morning. The measurement is the same, but the context changes everything.
“There are no technical problems. Ever. Only business problems.”
– Jan Willem Klerkx, CEO, BonCode
How technology divides opinion
In 2025, it’s wild how often we still see the same split: business folks care about revenue, customers, and delivery timelines. Tech folks care about frameworks, clean architecture, and… well, code.
Too often, technical quality becomes a religion. Dogma. People willingly fight over whether .NET is better than Java, or whether low-code is a revolution or a plague. Meanwhile, the business just wants to know if they can launch next quarter.
And this is where things fall apart: each side is ‘right’ but they’re not aligned. High-performing companies like Amazon, Booking.com, or Spotify have this figured out. They don’t have ‘business’ and ‘IT’ camps. They have only business, with everyone understanding their role in creating value.
The ‘So what?’ test
One of our consultants recently brought up a technical finding during an assessment. It was accurate, but the business impact wasn’t clear. Our CCO, Harm Garvelink, asked a simple yet powerful question: ‘So what?’.
This is the bar we set at BonCode. If a technical issue can’t pass the ‘So what?’ test, if it doesn’t have real business consequences, then it’s not a priority. The system might have messy code. But if it’s been running for 10 years, will run for 10 more, and doesn’t need changes – who cares?
On the flip side, if you’re investing millions into a software product, and the only people who can maintain it are a handful of aging engineers using outdated code, that’s when quality matters – because it becomes a risk to the business.
Technical quality as a symptom
Technical issues are rarely the disease. They’re the symptoms. They point to deeper organizational issues: misalignment, outdated skills, and poor communication. That’s why our code assessments aren’t just about code. They’re about people, process, and impact:
- We don’t do tech for tech’s sake
- We find root causes
- We help teams understand when and how quality matters
- We translate software quality into a language business leaders understand
Show us the code; we’ll show you the consequences!
Technical people need to speak the language of business. Business people need to ask the right question: ‘So what?’. Code quality often goes unnoticed because when it’s working well, it keeps things ticking over smoothly, and moves the needle forward. When code quality is compromised, it can hurt your business.
Learn more about our systems for assessing and monitoring code. Speak to a quality expert today. Book a call
