Culture of Quality

Technical debt. Security incidents. Endless bugs. "War rooms." Late hours. Unhappy clients. Developer burnout. Staffing churn.

It's all connected. And even if you've gotten used to this way of life, know that it is not the only way.

Are there processes to follow and tools to use to improve the quality of your work and reduce your headaches? Yes, but as stated in the Agile Manifesto: "We have come to value Individuals and interactions over processes and tools." In this talk I'll focus mainly on the people and values- the cultural shifts needed to improve your quality, reduce your technical debt, and help your projects run smoothly and efficiently.

We'll go over the causes of technical debt and how to resist them.

We'll talk about communication and collaboration and how it is that these soft skills are the most valuable assets in a development project.

We'll discuss how to promote a culture that values and makes time for teaching and learning and the humility that comes with it.

We'll get into QA, code review, automated testing, and UAT and how to tighten feedback loops to increase your efficiency. I'll show you the processes my teams use, but keep the focus on the mindset and values. Spoiler: "We don't have time to do code review" is never true; rather you don't have time because you don't do code review.

Finally, we'll look at the culture and processes around quality and code review used on drupal.org and how it can inform your internal practice.

This session is geared to tech leaders such as lead developers, aspiring tech leaders, and developers who want to push best practices or influence their leadership.

I want you to walk away formulating a new plan for how you're going to change the mindset of your development team, encourage the habits that lead to quality results, and get ready to fight back against the antipatterns that lead to technical debt.