A friend of mine was ranting the other day. He had just done an iteration retrospective with his development team wherein they took a look at their quality metrics and discovered that "quality" had actually dropped off even though his team had spent more time than ever before on the client's official Quality Process.
I discussed this further with him and we agreed that quality is a mostly subjective concept when it comes to software ... we agreed that it can't be objectively meaasured ... we agreed that it can't be artificially injected "to meet the required metric" ... we agreed that it is something that Software Quality Assurers infer based on monitoring the various metric trends that make sense in the particular environment/context that the software is being developed in/for.
So with all this agreeance I asked him to explain further.
This story is probably a symptom of why I think there is so much cynism in the software industry. Read on if you dare!
It turns out that the client has a well worked out, well defined Quality Process that they are extremely happy with. This Process is guaranteed to prevent massive loss of life/income/spiralling out of control costs/etc etc - you can imagine why a large company invests huge amounts of time and money in creating a bullet proof Quality Process: manage risk, whatever that risk is.
Okay ... so why is my friend ranting? His team followed the process, passed a bunch of procedural milestones apparently and everyone was happy. Yet when he and his team look at the metrics they defined for how they measure quality, they noticed that the number of issues had risen, that some important tests had not been run early enough in the iteration to find issues that they could then respond to before the end of iteration. There were known open issues, and the were issues that had been addressed, but had not been signed off. There was waste accumulating that had not been a problem before.
How did this happen? The people whose responsibility it was to run the tests, to provide the early feedback had been too busy ensuring the team met the Quality Process requirements - they had been documenting, and reviewing and getting documentation reviewed and spending a large amount of time away from the product they were responsible for delivering. They were going on a tangent from users' needs.
And it showed.
There is no happy ending here - key client representatives (project stakeholders, but not users) have to ensure that their organisation's process is followed. Even if they know, and everyone else knows, that the process is not adding value, and that indeed, as above, the process is actually diminishing value. And it appears often that several times a group of client representatives need to experience failure and pain before they will attempt to address a badly formulated, or in the example above, placed, process. Sometimes, regrettably, these lessons are learned during retrenchment phases.
Yuck!
I discussed this further with him and we agreed that quality is a mostly subjective concept when it comes to software ... we agreed that it can't be objectively meaasured ... we agreed that it can't be artificially injected "to meet the required metric" ... we agreed that it is something that Software Quality Assurers infer based on monitoring the various metric trends that make sense in the particular environment/context that the software is being developed in/for.
So with all this agreeance I asked him to explain further.
This story is probably a symptom of why I think there is so much cynism in the software industry. Read on if you dare!
It turns out that the client has a well worked out, well defined Quality Process that they are extremely happy with. This Process is guaranteed to prevent massive loss of life/income/spiralling out of control costs/etc etc - you can imagine why a large company invests huge amounts of time and money in creating a bullet proof Quality Process: manage risk, whatever that risk is.
Okay ... so why is my friend ranting? His team followed the process, passed a bunch of procedural milestones apparently and everyone was happy. Yet when he and his team look at the metrics they defined for how they measure quality, they noticed that the number of issues had risen, that some important tests had not been run early enough in the iteration to find issues that they could then respond to before the end of iteration. There were known open issues, and the were issues that had been addressed, but had not been signed off. There was waste accumulating that had not been a problem before.
How did this happen? The people whose responsibility it was to run the tests, to provide the early feedback had been too busy ensuring the team met the Quality Process requirements - they had been documenting, and reviewing and getting documentation reviewed and spending a large amount of time away from the product they were responsible for delivering. They were going on a tangent from users' needs.
And it showed.
There is no happy ending here - key client representatives (project stakeholders, but not users) have to ensure that their organisation's process is followed. Even if they know, and everyone else knows, that the process is not adding value, and that indeed, as above, the process is actually diminishing value. And it appears often that several times a group of client representatives need to experience failure and pain before they will attempt to address a badly formulated, or in the example above, placed, process. Sometimes, regrettably, these lessons are learned during retrenchment phases.
Yuck!
