The Only Good Quality Metric is Morale - Jenny Bramble

Talk Description

Every metric for a QA team has pitfalls.

Some are combative and drive a wedge between departments. Some are useless or easily gamed. Some don't make any sense at all. So what's an agile team to do if they want to measure the quality of the software they are working so hard to produce? 

The speaker suggests looking inward, past all the obvious metrics and to the heart of the team. The team's morale can accurately predict the quality of the software they produce. In this talk, she will discuss some common metrics and their pit falls before making the case for morale as the top QA metric. She'll show how to measure changes in morale over time and what you can do to help increase the morale--and thus quality!--of your team.

Takeaways

•  Pitfalls of commonly used metrics: no. bugs found, production defects, time to resolution...
•  Morale as a meaningful metric: studies have shown high preforming teams are teams with high morale/psychological safety
•  Measuring morale in significant ways: surveys, team discussions, retros
•  Increasing morale to increase quality.

By the end of this session, you'll be able to:

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Jenny Bramble

Director of Quality Engineering

Jenny came up through support and DevOps, cutting her teeth on that interesting role that acts as the 'translator' between customer requests from support and the development team. Her love of support and the human side of problems lets her find a sweet spot between empathy for the user and empathy for my team.

She's done testing, support, or human interfacing for most of her career. She finds herself happiest when she's making an impact on other people--whether it's helping find issues in applications, leading scrum, speaking at events, or just grabbing a coffee and chatting.