Does quality in information technology cost time

The `time to market´ for any product is clearly an important factor and even more so in a fast developing industry like Information Technology (IT). However, in addition to being quick off the mark, a successful product must also have the difficult to define attribute of quality. The rhetorical question which has prompted this paper is `are these two objectives compatible and what are the trade offs between quality and lead time?´ Supplementary questions are; can quality be guaranteed and can timescales be controlled?