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When an organization wants to promote a culture of quality in software development, it focuses on specific values and principles of the product and the associated processes and techniques required to achieve a desired level of quality. Team members in a quality culture are always aware of this standard and strive to meet quality goals in the ways they approach work.
A quality-driven software engineering culture requires developers, testers, project managers, architects and even stakeholders to thoroughly understand how the organization defines quality and how to achieve it. This may take extra time, but it provides better returns than not incorporating quality in the long run.
At a minimum, an organization’s software quality team typically consists of three roles: QA analyst, QA lead and QA manager. More quality-focused team members might be necessary as the software engineering culture changes, but they don’t have to specifically be on the software quality team. Everyone in the organization will focus on quality.
In these organizations, every person involved with development should know and promote quality goals together:
Change can be a difficult thing to incorporate in any element of life, and software development is no different. When an organization wants to roll out a potentially massive, cultural and technical shift on how they develop software, it’s bound to create some challenges. Three of the more prominent and difficult challenges are resistance, diversity, and communication and collaboration.
Resistance. Change is often unwelcome. Software developers can be reluctant to embrace new policies and standards. Developers focused on meeting a tight deadline can’t find extra time to learn and implement new ideas to boost quality. Nevertheless, it’s imperative that teams dedicate time to reinforce quality standards and demonstrate the positive changes to get everyone on board.
Diversity. Development team members typically have different backgrounds, cultures and technical skill sets. Diversity is a good thing — but it also creates a learning curve. Management must clearly explain the quality culture it wants to instill in these team members and how they should adapt to these new practices.
Communication and collaboration. Distributed teams are common in today’s workforce. Team members can be separated by different countries, time zones and even languages. When management pursues quality, it must factor in how teams will communicate and collaborate. Messaging services and digital meetings can help bond remote teams and iron out any issues that come up over the course of development.
There are several key ideas to keep in mind when building a quality software culture:
Agile development can help teams prioritize and deliver software quality. However, Agile is not a requirement, and some broader aspects of Agile values and principles may not apply.
There are several ways in which Agile can help create and sustain a culture of software quality. Teams can embrace quality culture by focusing on teaching and allowing suggestions instead of dictating orders and demanding changes. Customer satisfaction and loyalty are directly linked to organizations with quality cultures. When you combine Agile and DevOps methodologies, you can further streamline processes to increase efficiency of development and delivery.
Part of: How to instill quality culture in software development teams
Team structure and culture should be a primary focus during any shift to Agile principles and methodologies.
Avoid headaches when you gather software requirements. Learn these seven Agile techniques to understand requirements without reverting to Waterfall.
Any Agile team that wants its team’s culture to be squarely centered on improving software quality, should consider the following incentives and tactics.
To successfully outsource an Agile development practice, organizations must prioritize communication and provide ample onboarding resources.
A software team needs quality to ensure a strong product. Here are some ways to implement quality in all facets of development and build it into every software release.
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