The following success story is based on Erik De Bos’s Experience Report, Assisting Agile Teams to Reach Quality Goals. See all the Experience Reports here.
Imagine this: you’re part of a software team brimming with enthusiasm, ready to deliver a game-changing application. Your team is pumped and fully committed to quality, aiming for high test coverage, zero errors, and spotless logs. But a few months later, the once-gleaming goals become hazy, and the chaos of daily work threatens to bury them altogether.
This isn’t just a story about one team at Swiss Post; it resonates with any team striving to maintain high-quality software in a fast-paced environment.
So, what did this team do differently to tackle these quality challenges and achieve their goals?
1. The challenge of software quality
Maintaining software quality can be a Herculean task. Issues like production errors, declining code coverage, and overwhelming logs often weigh down teams. These are more than just technical challenges; they represent a direct threat to business success.
When teams ignore these problems, the effects can be catastrophic: technical debt accumulates, operations falter, and business goals drift further away.
2. The Agile approach as a solution
Fortunately, Agile offers a lifeline. Agile equips teams with the tools to tackle these challenges head-on by focusing on collaboration, transparency, and iterative progress.
How Agile helped
The Swiss Post team embraced Agile principles to create a systematic approach to quality management. They crafted a practice built around the following:
- Clear Roles and Responsibilities: Assigning Quality Champion and Lead Developer roles.*
- Weekly Quality Report Meetings: Collaborative, open discussions to ensure transparency.
- Automated Quality Metrics: A system to provide real-time insights into quality issues.
*While Agile often emphasizes cross-functional teams, this doesn’t preclude the necessity for roles with specific responsibilities to streamline decision-making and accountability, which is what the Swiss Post team achieved by defining these roles.
3. The journey to success
Their path to success was paved with clear steps and consistent adaptation.
- Implementing the practice
The team began by setting ambitious quality goals. They integrated quality checks into their workflow and committed to monitoring and improving them regularly. - Overcoming obstacles
Like any journey worth taking, challenges emerged along the way. The team struggled initially with noisy logs and poor preparation. They adapted their approach to overcome these obstacles, focusing on teamwork and collaboration. - Emphasizing team collaboration
Collaboration became their cornerstone. Accountability and high standards became ingrained in their workflow, guiding them toward consistent success.
4. Results and impact
The results speak volumes. The team achieved its ambitious quality goals, maintaining 100% test coverage, zero errors in production, and quickly detecting rare issues. They transformed quality from a theoretical aspiration into a tangible reality.
These achievements directly translated into business benefits. Operational stability increased, customers received reliable software, and the team delivered consistently on its promises. The journey wasn’t easy, but the payoff was undeniable.
A Story of quality and persistence
The story of the Swiss Post team isn’t just about software; it’s about the power of Agile principles, commitment, resilience, and the willingness to tackle challenges head-on. Their Agile approach provided the clarity and framework needed to navigate chaos and maintain their unwavering dedication to quality.
