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Guest View: The future of quality lies in productivity


By Adam Kolawa
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May 1, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 3)


Managers push quality on developers the way parents push vegetables on their children. Given a choice, most kids won’t touch a lump of spinach sitting on their dinner plate. But if you blended pureed spinach into the chocolate brownies for which they always reach, your children would get the intended nutrients without your ever having to utter, “Eat your vegetables.”

During the past 20 years in the software industry, quality initiatives have come and gone, along with countless attempts to find a silver-bullet tool that would deliver quality with the click of a button. Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet. Some ideas work in theory, but few have succeeded in practice.

The major problem is that when managers try to improve quality, they unintentionally pile more work on time-starved developers. Quality tasks are introduced in such a way that they require developers to adjust their tried-and-true workflow to take on additional work. Not surprisingly, this usually isn’t well received. If developers don’t believe that learning and applying this new practice will be worth the effort, by relieving them of tedious tasks to allow them to focus on the creative work they enjoy, the practice eventually will decay. The developers probably won’t reject the new initiative outright; they will simply do it less and less until they stop altogether.  

We push these well-meaning quality initiatives without considering their effect on productivity. Quality increases productivity, we assume, but that’s not the case. If you want to introduce a quality initiative, do it in a way that doesn’t disrupt or slow the normal workflow. Otherwise, there’s little chance of achieving a sustainable quality process.

A good workflow can make or break a quality initiative. For example, assume that someone delivers a mandate: “All code must be peer-reviewed.” If the development manager responsible for implementing the peer code review interprets that as meaning, “No developer can check in code before it is reviewed,” he is creating a tremendous roadblock in the developers’ natural workflow. This is a prime example of a quality initiative that would hurt productivity.



Related Search Term(s): Management, software development

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