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Quality enablement to achieve predictable delivery

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4 minute read

You need quality enablement to achieve predictable delivery for your organisation which takes effort to achieve.

I do a lot of ALM Assessments for companies and almost every customer that I speak to has unpredictable quality in the software delivery that they receive from their teams. This is not always the Development Teams fault and is often the result of an organisation that is finely tuned to minimise the ability to have a defined and predictable level of quality. In most cases this is due to a lack of a bar that quantifies the minimum things that need to be completed in order for and organisation to understand what i involved in each delivery.

If you have no bar for delivery and thus no idea what needs to be completed for each thing to be delivered then how can you expect to make accurate (or at least as good as we can get) prediction on when things are going to be delivered? You would effectively have no empirical evidence to rely on for predictability of delivery. In addition, the varied quality level results in more bugs in production, which then puts those individuals’ responsible for adding features under more pressure. If you put developers under pressure they will consistently and increasingly cut quality to meet the same deliverable.

Quality enablement to achieve predictable delivery

Figure: The Iron Triangle

In addition many product backlogs lack acceptance criteria leaving the Development Team to guess at the basis by which the customer will accept that something is complete. Indeed because if this lack of acceptance criteria backlog items can often be deceptively large which puts the development team under greater pleasure for delivery and thus the cut quality.

Fix quality for improved predictability

The only way to successfully create predictable software delivery is to fix 3 of the 4 points of the Iron Triangle. In traditional software development quality is the hidden value and if you fix everything else it is Quality that suffers. Quality should be anchored with an explicit definition.

Doing all of these things will serve to make quality the goal not the lack of it.

Conclusion

The way that we have traditionally measured our development teams have finely tuned them to fluctuate quality in order to meet aggressive delivery schedules. However this fluctuating quality only serves to reduce our ability to deliver and annoy our customers when they find the resulting bugs.

The goal is to increase quality not reduce it but first we need to be able to measure that quality and enforce it.

measure-and-learn people-and-process blog definition-of-done develop improve measure predictable-quality quality-enablement strategic testing

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