Time to Market Vs Product Quality

As software becomes more and more part of revenue generation processes in all industrial domains, and as development cycles shorten significantly, the challenges of producing high reliability and quality as well as adhering to shorter time-to-market requirements have hit the software community. As unsuccessful cases demonstrate, the solution is neither to throw unreliable software on the market prematurely, nor to be late with high quality software. The key seems to be choosing the appropriate development model and using development processes in a goal-driven way. There is a big difference between product and process oriented development models. Which one is appropriate under what circumstances?

Another fascinating dimension to this issue is the effect of brand. If you launch a crappy product early, it harms your brand. But this percpetion can be mitigated by calling the product a "beta"! So instead of thinking of it as time-to-market, think of it as a public product test.

So when we think about all of this what strikes our mind is to come up with a process that takes care of both cases i.e quality and time to market.
Agile Methodologies like SCRUM and XP were formed to address these issues and moreover these processes focus more on the product than the process itself. SCRUM, XP have iterations where each iteration adds value to the product and at the end of every iteration you have working code. This is a product centric approach backed by a process that allows flexibilty.

Agile methodology should not be mistaken for Ad-hoc releases where the developers take last minute changes from the client or the customer in order to keep the customer happy and as a result of that ends up breaking the build somewhere else which in turn leads to long working hours and working on weekends. Simplicity is one of the principles of agile and do only what is required.

I would like to end this by stating that getting a product out in a short time frame is not a challenge but getting a product out in a short time frame which is of good quality and something you can be proud of is a challenge.
A product whose foundation is well built is more likely to succeed.