Heather Wilcox – NWEA
How does your Development culture affect your quality?
The Quality Control team I work on was recently looking at a series of Data Quality issues that had been found in production. In digging through the “whys” behind the defects, we came to the conclusion that most of the bugs were a direct result of the “Hurry Culture” that the development team had created for itself. From there, it wasn’t a difficult leap to the realization that our processes for handling production defects weren’t appropriate for a “Hurry Culture”. The question then became: Do we alter our culture to inspire a process that creates fewer defects, or do we embrace the “Hurry Culture” and rebuild our bug handling procedures so that teams were more responsive and faster at resolution?
Regardless of the answer to our own question, the lesson at hand is that success is driven by understanding the culture of your Development Department. Once you have that, you can deep dive into whether your tools and processes are appropriate for your development philosophy. This paper will explore the process of examining and diagnosing your team’s culture as well as determining whether your development and defect remediation programs adequately support that culture.
Heather Wilcox, 2021 Technical Presentation, Paper, Presentation
