Skip to main content

Quality is a team issue

I forgot where I found the following quote but I copied and printed it out as a reminder for myself:

Quality is a team issue. The most diligent developer placed on a team that just doesn’t care will find it difficult to maintain the enthusiasm needed to fix niggling problems. The problem is further exacerbated if the team actively discourages the developer from spending time on these fixes.

It remains one of the biggest lessons I learned during my software career and it manifested itself in 2 ways:

  • Supermotivated developers eager to learn new things ending in a burn/born out after six months on a project. I saw really talented and motivated people (and especially these people) getting completely fed up by an organization not willing to move. I even saw people leave the IT industry because of this.
  • A negative trend in general software quality when one or more of the team members didn’t put the quality bar at the same level as the rest of the team. How much we tried to convince the developer to raise the bar, it unfortunately always ended to a lowering of the quality standard of the whole team instead. (See the Broken Window story)

Luckily I’ve also seen the other way around; when everyone aims for the same quality level (no matter if you are a UX’r, developer, analyst, tester, architect, …) than miracles happen. No problem becomes too complex to tackle and speed of delivery increases without sacrificing on quality.

But it all starts with one common value; that quality is a team issue…

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Azure DevOps/ GitHub emoji

I’m really bad at remembering emoji’s. So here is cheat sheet with all emoji’s that can be used in tools that support the github emoji markdown markup: All credits go to rcaviers who created this list.
Read more

Podman– Command execution failed with exit code 125

After updating WSL on one of the developer machines, Podman failed to work. When we took a look through Podman Desktop, we noticed that Podman had stopped running and returned the following error message: Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125 Here are the steps we tried to fix the issue: We started by running podman info to get some extra details on what could be wrong: >podman info OS: windows/amd64 provider: wsl version: 5.3.1 Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: failed to connect: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:2655: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. That makes sense as the podman VM was not running. Let’s check the VM: >podman machine list NAME         ...
Read more

Cleaner switch expressions with pattern matching in C#

Ever find yourself mapping multiple string values to the same result? Being a C# developer for a long time, I sometimes forget that the C# has evolved so I still dare to chain case labels or reach for a dictionary. Of course with pattern matching this is no longer necessary. With pattern matching, you can express things inline, declaratively, and with zero repetition. A small example I was working on a small script that should invoke different actions depending on the environment. As our developers were using different variations for the same environment e.g.  "tst" alongside "test" , "prd" alongside "prod" .  We asked to streamline this a long time ago, but as these things happen, we still see variations in the wild. This brought me to the following code that is a perfect example for pattern matching: The or keyword here is a logical pattern combinator , not a boolean operator. It matches if either of the specified pattern...
Read more