Quality is a luxury which is not in the project plan?!?
I was reading a usually funny dilbert-esque blog (Richard Saunders, a recently appointed team lead who doesn’t want the lead role) and his latest posting really irked me. Richard weaves a delightful little story about how a new hire “has been wasting his time writing JUnit tests instead of coding”. Wasting? I don’t think many people consider writing unit tests wasting time. Granted, as a new hire, this guy should probably be focussed on producing mostly new code with some unit tests, instead of writing tests for older code. This percentage of code/tests could maybe be adjusted to keep the guy on schedule instead of “wasting” time.
Another quote: “I do see some value in what he is doing but I’d rather him not do any of that and just meet our deadlines”. I agree, deadlines are very important, but the future stability of the product demands unit tests.
This next quote is what drove me crazy enough to post this entry. “Quality is a luxury which is not in the project plan”. Geez. I’d hate to work there. Quality should never be looked at as a luxury…it’s an essential buildng block to a stable product. The attitude seems to be - Let’s produce a piece of crap just so we can meet our deadlines. Don’t worry, we’ll fix everything later. Have you ever looked at the economics of software development? The cost of fixing further along the project cycle exponentially increases. Freeze the project now, re-evaluate the schedule to include steps to build in quality and then set achievable goals. How can people not see how essential this is and build in quality from the start. Granted, I have no idea what their schedule is, the reasons why they have such a strict deadline and why they aren’t including any quality steps so I’m speaking from an outsider’s viewpoint.
Kudos to Tool Boy for trying to inject some quality in this product. Richard, as the new team lead you should be responsible for leading the team in producing quality code and making a stand to adjust the schedule. Take a look at some (not all, I’ll admit) XP practises while you’re at it.