Software Development Teams and Quality

Quality results from a million selfless acts of care — not just of any great method that descends from the heavens.[¹]

One of the goals of Engineering leadership teams is to maintain a good level of technical quality. Improving quality should come while devoting as much energy as possible to the core business.

When building for an entire engineering organization, anything you do well will speed up the organization.

Adopt best practices that are known to improve quality. Measure technical quality to guide deeper investment. Two practices help with quality efforts for most Engineering organizations out there. Technical Quality Team and Quality Program

Quality Program

A quality program takes on the broad remit of achieving the organization’s target level of software quality. Run a quality program to measure, track and create accountability. Generate sustainable, reproducible metrics.

Rather than reaching for process improvement, start by donning the performance engineer’s mindset. Identify program goals for every harmed team and a clear path for them to do those goals. Build the tools and documentation to support teams toward their goals.

Keep your program lean enough to cancel, and remain self-critical enough to cancel if it ceases driving quality creation.

Technical Quality Team

A technical quality team is a software engineering team dedicated to creating quality in your codebase. The team creates systems and tools to improve quality directly or indirectly.

There’s a fundamental tension between centralized quality teams and the teams they support. Instead of having a specific group of people dealing with quality, rotate the members across every team.

[¹]: Robert Martin(2008): (Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship)