I've had to live with shipping software with really poor quality that had loads of small bugs. My Product Manager forced me to. However, at the end, the customers seemed happy, and I have to admit that I was partially wrong.
The QA guys flushed out the big bugs and many of the small ones. Without any proof, I imagine something like 99% of the customers would hit only a few bugs, that they are used to compensate for (reloading pages etc), leading to a view of the product as having good quality. I was wrong: the sw quality is poor, but the percieved quality is good. I would of course prefer to do sw of much better quality.
Matches my experience. I think that 98% of the people that used our software were using only 2-3 battle-tested happy paths, and just never hit any bugs, not because there weren't any (there were hundreds of bugs in JIRA spanning 3+ years of development) but simply they didn't trigger the non-hot code path ever.
The software was crap, but it made money, so it wasn't crap.
The QA guys flushed out the big bugs and many of the small ones. Without any proof, I imagine something like 99% of the customers would hit only a few bugs, that they are used to compensate for (reloading pages etc), leading to a view of the product as having good quality. I was wrong: the sw quality is poor, but the percieved quality is good. I would of course prefer to do sw of much better quality.