Agile teams are expected to follow the agile principle of technical excellence to enable agility. However, even highly skilled and motivated agile teams are prone to failing to achieve their own goals. During my past ten years in software development, I repeatedly saw that highly motivated teams agreed to a specific quality goal. Examples of such quality goals are no compiler warnings, full test coverage, or errors in production logs. Then, I discovered that they began to make minor exceptions and tradeoffs. Finally, the broken window effect kicked in, and suddenly the effort to reduce the exceptions was too high, and they gave up on the goal. Based on observations and literature, I hypothesized about the problems which lead to this effect, and I introduced a practice called "quality report". The practice is simple but carefully designed to address the issues and consists of a weekly procedure, specific roles, and a tool. At the time of writing, the agile team has used this practice successfully for two years.
Piet Heinkade 179
Amsterdam 1019 HC
Netherlands
goal
incentives
broken-window-effect
practice
motivation
DevOps
sustainability