Colin Breck from Tesla on Quality Views to Expose Technical Debt

Show Notes

• 0:30 Introductions
• 1:10 Background in industrial control and monitoring systems
• 1:40 Where the idea of quality views came from
• 1:55 The challenges of exposing the quality of systems that are not customer facing
• 2:05 Finding a way to show quality when there is no UI, and
• 2:15 A mechanism to show changes in a system over time
• 2:50 A tool to have continual conversations about the overall quality of a system
• 3:30 An experiment using multiple quality factors
• 3:50 Simple scoring mechanism and mapping to a colour gradient drawn on a block diagram of a system
• 4:20 Quality is a subjective – the value is in the conversations rather than the numbers
• 5:15 Adoption is most effective when adopted bottom-up rather than top-down enforcement
• 5:50 Using quality views to help plan and prioritise development of features in the product and paying down technical debt
• 6:45 Positive reactions to using quality views
• 1:05 Story of a product manager using a quality view to identify significant risk in an overall system
• 8:30 Ways this can be misused
• 9:10 Quality and features are not either/or – quality views
• 9:45 Starting conversations around systems that have technical debt that was not well recognised
• 10:15 Striking the balance between new features and improving quality
• 11:20 Adoption by other teams and groups – asking for feedback
• 11:50 There could be multiple quality views – identify the quality measures that matter
• 12:30 The challenges of subjective evaluations across teams

Mentioned:

• Tesla
• Michael Feathers