Скачать или смотреть [Webinar] What Could Go Wrong? Prevent delays and production issues by committing to quality early

Early commitment to quality can spare us a massive portion of production issues and help us prioritise the right qualities to detect quality risks early.

Life happens, and we can never be completely prepared. And yet, there are obvious obstacles we could prevent so they don't slow us down when it's too late, especially if we're on a tight schedule.

Embracing the fear that something will go wrong is liberating.

Instead of worrying if something will go wrong, or worse - denying to be worried about anything that is not a fact yet, let's just face and accept it - there will be problems, smaller or bigger. They will eat your time. You will have to troubleshoot and fix them late at night. They will delay your release and make you do damage control and more than one tweak in your plans.

Something that you couldn't even imagine will go wrong. But it's fine. It's OK.

There is a way to make sure you have the mental and physical capacity to deal with it when it happens.

We, as a Team, are more complex than our software. We can beat it.

We possess unique personal traits and soft and hard skills. We have unique backgrounds, education, friends, experience, knowledge, hobbies... We live close to work, work from home or prefer a longer commute when we can enjoy some audiobook or podcast time.

Every piece of us is relevant to the quality of our work just as much as the uniqueness of our users defines their quality expectations.

We are unique, and we should cherish and use this uniqueness daily to come up with as many "what could go wrong" ideas as early as we read the user story... or even earlier.

Get together as a Team. Invite your sales and marketing team members, a DevOps engineer, the development team, your customer representative or a friend of yours, your design and product people, and anyone who might use, build or be interested in any way in your feature. Ask them what could go wrong. Spend 30 minutes for 1-2 stories in the beginning. If you think that's a lot, then imagine all these people trying to troubleshoot and fix only one of the "what could go wrong" things two months later.

Make the "What Could Go Wrong" meeting a routine to prepare yourself for the unexpected. By identifying quality risks early in the process, using all your imagination, knowledge and skills, you let this cognitive load go. You free your team to create and innovate, to make giant steps with confidence and without fear.

Brainstorming what could go wrong with our software is a powerful technique to put ourselves in our users' shoes and become aware and prepared to deal with a variety of quality risks early before they become expensive and unmanageable. Asking ourselves what could go wrong helps us prioritise the most critical quality requirements and drive the entire development effort in the right direction, ensuring we've ensured the right qualities.

Add a "What Could Go Wrong?" section to your user story and brainstorm the potential production issues during your refinement sessions, for example. What could go wrong with the solution you're building when your user sits in front of your software?

See what works for you, but don't give up on quality. It's always late :D

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