The quest for quality in Agile Software Development
 There are times when I think project managers should be taken outside and shot! There is such a thing as loyalty to the team, and it is important. But there does come a point where excuses have to end and the PM has to admit to their own failures.
Quality seems to be one area where this happens regularly. I've become a little tired over the years of "Agile" being used as an excuse for not testing something thoroughly before it is handed to a client, or not documenting the way something works at least at an architectural level. And I've grown tired of project managers who think that "shouting and escalation" is the best way to get people to meet goals they haven't really bought in to.
When I was managing projects (rather than programmes) the idea of showing a client something that had not been checked, reviewed and signed off would have been alien to me. When I sat with a member of the client's staff to rough up screens, structure functionality or check a feature, they would see the rough cut, and that would be understood and expected. But at the key milestones, when I delivered an iteration or concluded a timebox (ValueFrame as we called them in the Accelerated Value Method I favoured) I made damned sure fields aligned, text was spelt correctly and the colours were consistent. I certainly would not have allowed a system generated error message to appear unless that was what the client wanted.
Yet Agile as applied seems to have robbed this sense of self-respect from projects. Half finished artefacts are handed over with a shrug and a "we ran out of time." QA is abandoned in favour of developers testing their code. Instead of handing it to a UAT specialist to give it a shake-down software is provided to clients untested and unknown.
This has to stop. Agile is a powerful approach to developing software - but that doesn't mean a sense of pride should be left at the door. What you present to your client says a lot about you and if it is anything less than polished and complete you are, I'm afraid, not going to impress anyone. And as soon as anything starts to go wrong the business will come down on you harder than a supplier that has displayed commitment to quality and respect for the brand of the client who is paying their salaries.
So project managers (whether you go by the name scrum master or not) remember to retain that sense of pride in your work. Remember it is your client's business that you have in your hands, and if you want to impress them and engender longer term trust and mutual benefit include quality assurance as an integral part of everything you do. Good quality is noticeable in not being noticed : poor quality stands out a mile.
Previously on this blog...
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The quest for quality in Agile Software Development
Why quality assurance remains a central part of project management, regardless of the use of Agile methods
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