The Art of Agile Development, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Quality

For many people, “quality” means “testing,” but Agile teams treat quality differently. Quality isn’t something you test for; it’s something you build in. Not just into your code, but into your entire development system: the way your team approaches its work, the way people think about mistakes, and even the way your organization interacts with your team.

This chapter has three practices to help your team dedicate itself to quality:

• “No Bugs” builds quality in.

• “Blind Spot Discovery” helps team members learn what they don’t know.

• “Incident Analysis” focuses your team on systemic improvements.

QUALITY SOURCES

The ideas in No Bugs come from Extreme Programming.

Blind Spot Discovery is a collection of several techniques: Validated Learning, which comes from Eric Ries’s Lean Startup; Exploratory Testing, an approach spearheaded by Cem Kaner, although my description is based on Elisabeth Hendrickson’s work [Hendrickson2013]; Chaos Engineering, which originated with Greg Orzell and his colleagues at Netflix;¹ and Penetration Testing and Vulnerability Assessment, which are well-established security techniques.

My approach to Incident Analysis combines material from human factors and system safety research (specifically, Behind Human Error [Woods2010] and The Field Guide to Understanding ‘Human Error’ [Dekker2014]) with my understanding of effective retrospectives and facilitation, which owes a great deal to what I’ve learned from working with Diana Larsen. ...