Features or Quality? It’s always been difficult getting business partners (from executives to product owners) interested in quality—be that code quality, design quality, automated testing, or technical debt. Software technical excellence numbers (ah, if we just had good numbers) don’t mean much to business partners. Recently I’ve been adding to the Agile Triangle (Value, Quality, [...]
As I talk with companies around the world it’s clear that a significant number of them are still mired in the productivity, efficiency, and optimization mud. It’s easy to spot them because they are often maniacal about measuring velocity—team velocity, velocity across teams, rolling up velocity to an organizational level or even velocity per developer [...]
The more I visit companies and see mangled agile implementations, the more I’m convinced that quality, or lack thereof, remains the central issue to effective agility. Organizations begin agile implementations with higher quality as the goal, but then too frequently don’t carry through with the discipline to achieve the goals they have established. There are [...]
[quote style="boxed"]“Technical Debt may be costing you more than you imagined!”[/quote] There has been a great deal of discussion in the agile community about technical debt, much of it recently being led my colleague Israel Gat. The technical debt curve in the Figure shows how technical debt increases the cost of change over time, until [...]
