Usability, Reliability, Defects
Ways we can bring Quality to the Outcome
Agile Practices Examples
- Coach teams on the Definition of Done – Your DoD is the fixed measure or explicit definition of quality for your software development process. It is a short measurable checklist which mirrors shippable product that can and is applied to every unit of work delivered. It can be hard to define but without it we don’t know how much work needs to be done in order to ship any backlog item. Apply it at least to the output of the iteration and ideally to every backlog item that you complete.
- Coach teams on well written Acceptance Criteria for Epics, Features and Stories – While the DoD is applied equally to every backlog item acceptance criteria only applies to an individual item. All conversations between the Development Team, Product Owner and the Business should be reflected in the acceptance criteria so that things that are discussed are not missed. This also serves to understand scale and encourages breaking down backlog items into smaller units of work. Once you understand what needs to be done to complete an item, overly large items become transparently obvious.
DEVOPS Practices
- Automated Builds – Having automated builds that can measure the quality of your software is paramount to minimising the amount of work that the team needs to do to verify the software and creating automated acceptance tests and unit tests increase the validity of those builds. Ideally you should have an automated test (UI or Unit) for every acceptance criteria that was added to the backlog item.
- Automated Deployment – Having automated deployment will force the team to create working software and allow you to build and maintain something that will minimize the cost of delivery. If the Development Team knows that the business can choose to ship at any time they are then under pressure to maintain that ship-ability and thus quality.