Name
Assisting Agile Teams to Reach Quality Goals
Date & Time
Thursday, June 15, 2023, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Marc Sallin Meinrad Jean-Richard
Description

Agile teams are expected to follow the agile principle of technical excellence to enable agility. However, even highly skilled and motivated agile teams are prone to failing to achieve their own goals. During my past ten years in software development, I repeatedly saw that highly motivated teams agreed to a specific quality goal. Examples of such quality goals are no compiler warnings, full test coverage, or errors in production logs. Then, I discovered that they began to make minor exceptions and tradeoffs. Finally, the broken window effect kicked in, and suddenly the effort to reduce the exceptions was too high, and they gave up on the goal. Based on observations and literature, I hypothesized about the problems which lead to this effect, and I introduced a practice called "quality report". The practice is simple but carefully designed to address the issues and consists of a weekly procedure, specific roles, and a tool. At the time of writing, the agile team has used this practice successfully for two years.

Location Name
Kleine zaal (IJzaal), 5th floor
Full Address
Pakhuis de Zwijger
Piet Heinkade 179
Amsterdam 1019 HC
Netherlands
Session Type
Experience Report
submissions_id
7934
Track Color
Blue
Session Length
20
Keywords
agile
goal
incentives
broken-window-effect
practice
motivation
DevOps
sustainability
Learning Objectives
Learning to fail, failing to learn
Track
Engineering