High Performance Teams have Quality Developers!

At Qnit we deal with digitalization projects every day. We found, there are two crucial success factors to high quality in digital product and service development: High Perfomance Teams and automation.

Taking a look at one success factor for High Perfomance Teams at a time: Quality Management.

It is only a matter of time until our current age of digitalization starts to change your organization to having agile teams. The big question always is how to transition from departments and silos into agile teams? What's the focus of the agile team? Developing products mostly. What becomes of the role of Project Manager or Quality Manager in an agile team? They become part of the agile (development) team. They become (product) developers.

In a Scrum Team all roles (Scrum Master, Product Owner and development team) are streamlined to focus on the product they build and short term on the done increment they build at the end of the Sprint. There is no Quality Manager directing and managing quality. There is no Project Manager directing and managing the development team. So what happens to the Quality Manager?

The Product Owner needs to understand quality and how to make it transparent for the Development Team. The Development Team needs to make their work transparent. A Definition of Done is nothing else but the quality definition of the done increment. All Scrum Artifacts (Backlog, Sprint Log and Increment) need to be transparent. They can only be transparent if we define quality of transparency for each artifact. DoD for the Increment. Acceptance Criteria and Tests for Backlog Items. A clear Sprint goal needs to be qualified. The Development Team needs to automate quality assurance. They have to do that by automating Tests and the assembly of the Increment (Continous Integration).

When today's Quality Managers let go of their position and stop worrying about entitlement they can make great contributions as tomorrow's Quality Developers in agile Teams. They can work as Scrum Master or as part of the Development Team and can bring in their unique perspective on quality and boost the Team's performance. What a fantastic and interesting chance for change!