For many people, “quality” means “testing,” but Agile teams treat quality differently. Quality isn’t something you test for; it’s something you build in. Not just into your code, but into your entire development system: the way your team approaches its work, the way people think about mistakes, and even the way your organization interacts with your team. In this session, Arlo Belshee and Llewellyn Falco join us to discuss how to build quality in.

Arlo Belshee is a 20-year legacy code & DevOps veteran with a passion for zero bugs. A firm believer in mending code, Arlo's current work is his company, Dig Deep Roots, where he teaches technical practices that unwind legacy code safely a codebase at a time.

Llewellyn Falco is an Agile technical coach. He’s known for strong-style pairing, the open source “ApprovalTests” testing tool, and co-authoring the Mob Programming Guidebook. Llewellyn spends most of his time programming in C# and Java and specializes in improving legacy code.

Reading:
📖 Quality (introduction)
📖 No Bugs

🎙 Discussion prompts:

• The book conveniently describes four ways to prevent errors and build quality in. First is programmer errors. What are your go-to techniques for preventing coding mistakes?

• Next is design errors. How do you stop your design and architecture from becoming a source of errors?

• Requirement errors are also common. What do you do to ensure the team builds the right thing?

• Finally, systemic errors. How do you find your team’s blind spots and prevent them from recurring?

About the Book Club

From October 2021 to August 2022, I hosted a call-in talk show based on the second edition of The Art of Agile Development. The series used the book as a jumping-off point for wide-ranging discussions about Agile ideas and practices, and had a star-studded guest list.

For an archive of past sessions, visit the book club index. For more about the book, visit the Art of Agile Development home page.