Welcome – QUALITY.md - viralpique.com

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Open formatAgent skillCLI

Engineer loops to improve project quality, aligning your team and agents on
what quality means for what matters most.

What is QUALITY.md?

QUALITY.md is anopen file formatfor declaring a project quality model: a holistic rubric of the desired
quality characteristics (security, maintainability, code quality, test/spec
quality, etc.), their quality requirements (guides, sensors, principles,
standards, rules, specs), and the context (mission/purpose, user/stakeholder
needs, risks, etc.) for why they matter.

The QUALITY.md formatspecificationis designed to be agent, tool, and vendor agnostic. The companion /qualityagent skilland qualitymdCLIserve as both a reference implementation and starter kit for working with
QUALITY.md files, including the ability to create a comprehensivequality evaluation reportwith prioritizedimprovement recommendationsready for handoff or further review, useful for engineering quality loops or
augmenting your existing workflow.

Why QUALITY.md?

Ensure stakeholders are aligned on what matters most and why
Identify the most impactful and low risk quality improvements
Build agentic control loops to continuously maintain and improve quality
Manage quality proactively instead of reactively
Tackle intent, comprehension, and technical debt
Move judgement and taste up the loop stack
Compound learning at the highest leverage point

Philosophy

Maintaining the quality of a thing is caring for it. When a thing exists for the benefit of another, caring for it well is caring for the other well.

The aim of QUALITY.md is to help others care well by making the practice of maintenance accessible to humans and agents.

How to use QUALITY.md?

Set up

Install the /quality agent skill:
```
npx skills add qualitymd/quality.md
```
Install the qualitymd CLI:
```
npm install -g quality.md
```
See getting started for other install
methods.
Invoke /quality setup to create a tailored QUALITY.md for
evaluation and continued refinement.

Act

Hand off quality improvement recommendations to inner agent loops,
teammates, or the workflow best suited to the change.

Improve

Run /quality improve to refine QUALITY.md from what the evaluation
and improvement work revealed.

Loop

Return to Evaluate with a sharper model and continue compounding quality
learning.

Quickstart

Create your first QUALITY.md to establish a project quality model.

Engineer the Quality Loop

Elevate quality evaluation and improvement up the loop stack.

Example quality evaluation

See project quality ratings by project area and quality factor.

Specification

The open, vendor-neutral, QUALITY.md standard.

/quality agent skill

Effortlessly set up, evaluate, and improve.

CLI reference

QUALITY.md linting and management utilities.

FAQ

A quality model is an explicit, shared description of what “good” means
for something you maintain. In QUALITY.md, that means the areas of a
project, the quality factors that matter for each, and concrete
requirements with checkable assessments — plus a rating scale for
judging results and the context for why any of it matters. Instead of
quality living in people’s heads and scattered review comments, the
model makes it visible enough for teams and agents to evaluate, align
on, and improve.The idea has a long lineage. Manufacturing quality management
(Shewhart’s statistical quality control, Juran’s “fitness for use”)
carried into software through McCall’s and Boehm’s models in the
1970s, HP’s FURPS, Dromey’s model, and the ISO 9126 and ISO 25010
standards. Across five decades the same pattern recurs: decompose
quality into the characteristics that matter for a particular thing
and its stakeholders, refine them into sub-characteristics, and tie
those to assessable criteria.In practice, these models rarely spread beyond large organizations
with formal quality programs: building and tailoring a detailed model
was costly, and the metric-based rating methods meant to make quality
measurable proved too reductive — or too complex — for everyday use.
AI changes that. Agents make a tailored quality model cheap to
establish and maintain, and inferential judging of quality
requirements makes holistic evaluation accessible — good enough for
many use cases where formal measurement never was.

What’s covered by the formal QUALITY.md specification?

The specification defines the file format and its
meaning: document structure (YAML frontmatter plus a Markdown body), the
frontmatter schema for areas, factors, requirements, and the rating
scale, naming and reference rules, and model semantics (how sources
resolve, how requirements scope to their declaring area, how factors
connect, and what the rating scale means). Conformance is a property of
documents; the spec doesn’t prescribe or certify any evaluation method.
It’s deliberately agent-, tool-, and vendor-agnostic. The
/quality skill and qualitymd CLI are companions —
a reference implementation and starter kit, not part of the format
itself.

Is QUALITY.md only for modeling software quality?

No. The format is domain agnostic: it applies wherever you want to be
deliberate about quality — documentation sets, data products, research
reports, service operations, and more. There’s no default factor
checklist to import; each model earns its factors from the modeled
thing’s own needs and risks.

Is QUALITY.md open source? How is it licensed?

Yes. The specification, /quality agent skill, and qualitymd CLI are
all developed in the open at
github.com/qualitymd/quality.md
and released under the MIT license.

How does QUALITY.md relate to agent skills and rules (e.g. AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md)?

They’re complementary layers. Rules files like AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md
tell an agent how to work in your project, and skills give it
procedures for specific tasks — both steer the inner coding loop, action
by action. QUALITY.md declares what quality means: the shared bar
the resulting work is judged against. The /quality skill connects the
two — it reads your QUALITY.md to evaluate the project and produces
recommendations you can hand off to any agent, teammate, or workflow. In
loop terms, rules and skills guide the inner loop; QUALITY.md powers the
evaluation and improvement loops above it.

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Welcome – QUALITY.md