Software is not just running businesses, but for many, it is running the relationship between the customer and that business.

But that requires software delivery organizations to fundamentally change their way of thinking about the processes, skills, and tools being employed to deliver that software. By moving quality earlier in the life cycle, software delivery pros can build software of a higher quality but more importantly, deliver innovative software faster.

To introduce a more robust developer quality practice I suggest:

  • Educate developers on testing and quality. Testing and quality are a key responsibility of developers, but for many, their testing skills were picked up while doing other things. In fact, for many, testing is considered to be a sign of weakness or a discipline practiced by developers who cannot develop. These ideas need to dispelled, with developers not only being educated on great practices for development quality but also understanding why it will help their career and professional development.
  • Automate with tools and connect them into your build and release process. As delivery velocity and complexity increases, it is very difficult to measure development quality without using tools. Those tools provide objective measures that can help drive behavior within the delivery team. By using this information, it is possible to better enable the CI process, allowing CI to only select code that has achieved a certain level of quality. This reduces the amount of churn in integration testing, reducing the number of false defects and wasted time.
  • Integrate the life cycle for information sharing. Quality is not an abstract concept but should be something very tangible to both the developer and the delivery team. By treating development quality as a first-class citizen within the ALM tools and sharing it in the same way that code and requirements are being shared, software delivery teams get a better understanding of the applications and the state they are in.

Have a nice day!

By João Carlos Pereira | Market Director | Via LinkedIn Pulse