The Quality Muscle

Use it or lose it

Who is responsible for the quality of the output of your engineering org? If you answered "QA" then you're either a QA or you really need to read the rest of this article.

Quality, like reliability, is such a cross-cutting concern that it has to be everyone's job. But making it everyone's job means that it will soon become no one's job. For all the pithy phrases on the wall like 'Quality is job no. 1' (right next to 'The Customer is Always Right'), quality will only be noticeable by its absence in your product. Many orgs try and paper this over by hiring QA and making the head of QA responsible for the number of bugs in production. I'm not saying that this is wrong. It might very well be the right answer. But not before an org has built the Quality Muscle.

So how then, does an org get good at delivering a quality product at speed? How does an org build the 'quality muscle'?