Daily assessment at Agile Tour Lausanne
On November 18, I will have the pleasure of giving a talk at the Agile Tour Lausanne about how the daily assessment process helps Scrum teams handle the system internal quality.
I will argue that if we want to control quality, we need to place it at the heart of the feedback loop. For example, over the past decade we learned that making testing the responsibility of developers does lead to better functional quality without increasing costs. However, functional quality is just that: functional.
Many other concerns require similar attention. The internal quality of the structure of the system is as important. The interaction between the different technologies used is as important. The conformance to external guidelines and constraints is as important. The security issues can be as important. Even the cleanness of the build system can be an important issue. These are important, but we still approach them ad-hoc. As a consequence, quality suffers.
I introduce a daily assessment process that makes checking these concerns a daily routine. Daily assessment follows the humane assessment philosophy and it involves the following steps:
- identify concerns and make them explicit,
- craft dedicated concern checkers,
- discuss issues in a daily assessment stand-up, and
- fix today what can be fixed quickly.
To make this process practical, building checkers must be fast and cheap. The Moose analysis platform makes this possible.