Quality, Critical Thinking and Risk in Modern Engineering
Rethinking how we think about quality in discovery, delivery, and service operations can help us to better understand the nature of risk and where to apply our critical thinking skills.
What we value and perceive as quality evolves over time—a cracking good night at twenty involved drinking dozens of pints and dancing until 6 a.m. The equivalent today is an evening with close friends around a fire pit, all tucked up in bed by 11. Time definitely changes things!
It makes sense that, given our software engineering advances, our product quality concept also morphs. We have invented new things like cloud computing, microservices architecture, and modern languages. SaaS products have merged our discovery and delivery, and continuous deployment merges our delivery and service operations. We're no longer distinct activities; we're that continuous infinity loop of customer value.
Because of that, we need to adapt and change once again. Today, quality requires continuous conversation about the shared understanding of value through discovery, delivery, and operations. To me, it makes sense that this conversation is driven by quality professionals—people who have one foot in the world of product and one in the world of engineering.
Architects, principal engineers, and SREs are also in a prime position to make this happen.
Customer Value in Modern Engineering
Quality Professionals must carry the message of customer value from discovery into delivery, ensuring that they continue to have a shared understanding of the why. Quality Professionals are product advocates. How many people in the discovery space realise and value this?
Risk in Modern Engineering
Quality professionals focus on risk. Risk here is whatever threatens customer value. This allows teams to make the necessary tradeoffs in an informed way on what to build, how to build it, and how to support it. These quality professionals begin the conversation in discovery around critical user journeys and what recovery looks like.
Critical Thinking in Modern Engineering
It's not new that thinking critically is challenging when under pressure to deliver output.
Quality professionals help teams think critically about quality, what quality means for the organisation, how they know they have quality and how to make quality visible.
If quality professionals don't behave this way, ask yourself why. Do they have the necessary support and structures to allow them to do so? Or is their world reduced to pass/fail and taking screenshots of defects?
Reclaiming Customer Experience
Do we even know what customer experience means? Has it been reduced to the ability to fix our mistakes quickly?
We've overindexed on output and speed of delivery to the point where we've lost our understanding of customer experience. Enshitification is real. If we're not careful, AI will only amplify this.
It's time for a reset. It's time for the 'voice of the customer' to return. Rather than pass/fail, how about letting quality professionals stroll through the halls of discovery, delivery and service operations and begin asking some important and necessary questions around quality and value.
Who knows, this approach may be precisely what you need to help distinguish your product from the crud of software we've come to accept as a service.
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