Suggested Leadership Actions

Inspect

• Review your QA activities and when and where defects are found. Assess whether Agile practices would allow more defects to be found sooner.

• Review the lists of open bugs for your projects. How many open bugs are there? Does the number imply that your projects are building up a backlog of latent defects as they go, without fixing them?

• Ask your teams to show you their Definition of Done. Do they have a clear, documented definition, and are they using it? Do the details of the definition cumulatively amount to “releasable”?

• Investigate whether your teams measure the percentage of rework on their projects and use it as an input for process improvement work.

• What impediments exist between what your teams are doing today and getting to “releasable”? How can you help your teams address those impediments?

Adapt

• Based on your assessment of when and where defects are found, create a plan to shift your quality practices earlier.

• Make a plan to reduce open bug counts on your projects and then to keep the counts low.

• Work with your teams to measure the percentage of effort that’s going into rework on your projects. Monitor this percentage as part of your process improvement efforts.

• Remove the impediments between what your team is doing today and getting to “releasable.”