At Agile2006, Co-founder of the Scrum methodology Ken Schwaber made a passionate case for maintaining software quality. Drawing examples of teams sacrificing testing, refactoring and other practices in order to meet deadlines, Ken argued that as professionals we should not accept business requests to sacrifice quality in order to meet timelines, and if quality does need to be sacrificed such a decision should be made by executive management and reflected in the financial statements of the company.
Ken's message: Not compromising on quality is not only your professional obligation but it is also important for your own joy of work and is critical for the company.
Ken started talking about companies that choose to cut quality in order to speed up time to market / competitiveness. The problems with doing this is that it reduces team velocity on future iterations, eventually companies can back themselves up into a corner and velocity can be negligible.
InfoQ recorded this session in video and it will appear on the site in the next few months.
Ken's message: Not compromising on quality is not only your professional obligation but it is also important for your own joy of work and is critical for the company.
Ken started talking about companies that choose to cut quality in order to speed up time to market / competitiveness. The problems with doing this is that it reduces team velocity on future iterations, eventually companies can back themselves up into a corner and velocity can be negligible.
For every $4 of competitive advantage gained by cutting quality, it costs $4 to restore it; andIn terms of how to get out of such a mess, Ken advised:
software is an organizational asset and decisions to cut quality must be made by executive management and reflected in the financial statements.
- Having a ScrumMaster teach the product owner how to maximize value, Sprint by Sprint
- Scrum Master doesn't allow his team to present any increment that isn't done
- CEO is appraised of root cause of the problem and privdes support
- We can only change ourselves (it's your responsibility to fight for quality). We have a professional responsibility to reject delivering poor quality or overcommitting on iterations, "not just because of quality, but because it can kill your company".
InfoQ recorded this session in video and it will appear on the site in the next few months.