The cost of poor quality is high

Discussions
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1

A helpful line from Stuart Thomas (@stuthomas).

I want to get your reaction to this.

What indicators have you observed/measured/discussed related to?

  • Customer trust
  • Brand reputation
  • Team morale

What teams and people do you work with/have worked closely with to help shape these perceptions?

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2

You could replace the word quality with accessibility and it would be a very similar message. Not completely on topic, sorry.

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3

First Law of Programming:

Lowering quality lengthens development time.

We all know that in the interest of time, we often let quality slide. The impact of that, however, slows even the delivery of the lower-quality software. – Ron Jeffries

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Various teams I’ve been on have used different measures such as

  • For team morale / job satisfaction, a “developer joy” 5 question weekly anonymous survey, questions drawn from Amy Edmunson’s work. This was something we, the delivery team members, came up with for ourselves.
  • For customer satisfaction and brand reputation, net promoter score from surveys (I wasn’t involved in doing this so not sure how it all works)
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5

I think all 3 are linked. For example if a customer gets a deployment where something isn’t quite right or worse not working once, then you can be forgiven if your response is open, honest and the fix/clarification is fast.
If it happens more than once than you are making “withdrawals” from the customers “trust fund”. the customer then starts to gets nervous, wants to know more about your processes, wants more evidence, wants quicker fix times, every fix becomes a priority etc.
That then starts to impact team morale, your sprints are being interrupted with fix tickets with ever decreasing expected delivery timescales with the team having to work harder to convince customers the quality is good. You’re not working on exciting new features, your velocity starts to decrease but your working twice as hard.
As soon as you have “overdrawn” the customers “trust fund”, thats when the brand reputation starts to get damaged. The customer is then talking to their peers about how poor your quality is, you can’t use them as a reference site and the relationship starts to disintegrate.

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