In software delivery, can speed and quality coexist?

When delivering software, balancing speed vs quality seems like a constant struggle. But can the two coexist? And if so, what needs to be in place for that to happen?

Here’s what Ten10’s expert panel had to say:

Vernon Richards

They are intrinsically linked. One enables the other and I think what underlies it is not necessarily the technology but it’s getting alignment. Because not only is quality subjective, but speed is subjective as well. The challenge is to make it explicit. So what do we mean by quality? What do we mean by speed?

Emma Hargreaves

I think the lever analogy is the one that ticked the boxes. You can have anything you want in terms of mitigating risk and doing things quickly. Whether you can have everything you want is another matter, and that’s where the levers and the dials come in as to where you focus your time and effort. And spend as well. We haven’t spoken about cost. To an extent, you can throw more money at a problem and hopefully make it go a bit quicker and have a slightly higher quality. It just doesn’t always work that way.

Robbie Falck

I don’t know where it comes from, but the phrase: slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Like a pit crew. When a car comes into a pit stop, if you look at any one member in a pit crew doing the change, they’re not moving frantically or fast, they’re moving with purpose. They’re doing what they need to do. It’s not hectic but the the overall effect, the process and the system together, is incredibly fast. I think a lot of it comes down to discipline and efficiency. A lot of the time, people who want you to go faster – they want to cut corners to go faster and that slows you down because you’ve got this group of disorganised people going as fast as they can but they don’t know where they’re going. They don’t know what they’re doing, so you don’t deliver anything.

A question I’ve got for the panel is: how do you convince your stakeholders that going slower, taking a step back and doing what you need to do, and going slower from the outside is actually going to let you go faster in general?

Stuart Day

I really like that example in terms of because one thing we didn’t talk about was team maturity and giving your teams that time to gel. I think it’s about the data that surrounds things. How do you convince people? Data is a great example of doing that.

Experimentation – can we just do something small? And often we don’t give ourselves time to learn anything, because we just want to go quicker. I always try and approach it in a way of: what can we try that’s small? It doesn’t have a huge impact on everything else that’s going on. Maybe we take a couple of people and we just try something. From the data you get from that, you can kind of go ‘okay, if we were to expand this, maybe we’d see a bigger return’. But you’ve got to get to a point where the team have that space to try and fail, as well. That’s how I’ve tried to get people thinking: can we just do something small to start with and then expand it and grow it.

Emma Hargreaves

To quickly add on the data, I think it’s important to benchmark where you are now so when you try doing something different, you can show what actually worked. Working out what data to capture to be meaningful and to show an improvement, that that can be a bit of a bit of a challenge, but being able to make demonstrable progress.

I think the other thing is understanding, again, what your stakeholder finds important. What’s important to them? Is that doing something more cheaply? Is it having a higher velocity? Is it having fewer defects leak into production? What actually causes them pain? What are they worried about? Speak to that, because if you’re if they’re worried about the money and you’re talking about defect leakage, they can’t join the dots to put the two things together.