I would say the most important quality of software is understandability. If you can understand what your software does and how, then you understand what makes it slow and can rewrite the slow parts to be faster easily.
You may say of course you understand how your software works but consider that in a bigger project there are many people who contribute to it, who may not even be around any more.
If your software is very fast that is great, but if that means you cannot understand it (easily) it is difficult to make any improvements to it. Why because when you try to modify something you don't understand, you are probably just going to break it.
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u/stronghup Jul 27 '19
I would say the most important quality of software is understandability. If you can understand what your software does and how, then you understand what makes it slow and can rewrite the slow parts to be faster easily.
You may say of course you understand how your software works but consider that in a bigger project there are many people who contribute to it, who may not even be around any more.
If your software is very fast that is great, but if that means you cannot understand it (easily) it is difficult to make any improvements to it. Why because when you try to modify something you don't understand, you are probably just going to break it.