Track Talk W10

The Path of Least Resistance

Irina Malgina

13:45-14:30 CEST Wednesday 14th June

Do you think software quality is perfectly covered in your company? There are development process descriptions, architectural standards, coding guidelines, security checklists, Definition of Done and whatever else might be needed for ensuring good enough quality of your products. But as the time goes, employees and teams change, knowledge and awareness of quality standards slowly keep flowing away. At some point you might discover all those quality standards are not consequently followed by all of the teams. Help, what now?

My company found itself in such a situation at one point. We set up a multidisciplinary team to initiate change. You might guess that the first and simple part of improvements was making standards easily accessible at a central location, as simple as possible and easy to understand. But the most important and challenging part was solving the issues of a social nature. Why were people not following the standards anyway? Why should they do that? What value will it provide to them and the company? Communication, creating awareness and understanding are the key.

And once the situation is improved, how can we keep it on track? Humans like to take the path of least resistance, how can we motivate them to take the ‘right’ path instead? Join my talk to hear about this journey, and what we learned along the way.