I wanted to add something to the topic from two days ago: Quality in the eyes of your users.

There is a thing I did not mention. A practice that could help you and your team achieve a higher quality of your products:

  1. Show your work early and often.
  2. Improve after receiving feedback.
  3. Repeat from step 1.

Results get better with feedback. It forces you to consider other points of view from your own. In case the input isn’t valid, you will still explain your point of view to the others. Which in turn helps you understand your personal opinion in a more profound, better way. Your team will establish a feedback culture in which it is normal to seek, accept and build on other peoples opinions. There is no reason to avoid that situation. Receiving and giving regular feedback and exchanging opinions builds courage. In your peers, in yourself. It also deepens the team spirit, because your solutions will come from the whole team. Everyone takes part in finding the optimum and recognizes parts of themselves in different aspects/features of the software. The result is shared ownership. And shared knowledge. Which is always good because you depend less on a singular individuum.

Doing feedback rounds early, also makes it easier to change course, should you find it necessary to do so.

And, there is often this dreaded line:

They client asks when they can see something. What can I tell them?

Having feedback rounds enforces a development culture where people create runnable/viewable results. How often do you have it, that a developer sits at their desk for two weeks or more? When the time comes to show what they have created, the following things might be true:

  • they are not done yet
  • it doesn’t look like the spec
  • it does not work reliably or at all
  • it does not integrate well with the rest of the product

Early feedback rounds prevent this from happening. When was the last time you showed your work and asked for feedback?

Yours, Holger