Speed vs Quality: Can You Have Both?

In this talk, I’d like to cover the trap of working harder, which leads to a choice between speed or quality and the virtuous cycle of working smarter, which leads to both speed and quality.

Working harder often makes people think they must choose speed and sacrifice quality or improve quality and forfeit speed. In the trap of working harder, I will detail how we stay late to get more done or take shortcuts by skipping review sessions or cutting testing. I’ll describe how they appear to speed up delivery in the short term, but in the long term, they lead to burnout, unmaintainable systems and longer delivery cycles. 

In the virtuous cycle of working smarter, I’ll detail how through improved collaboration, we can identify bottlenecks to delivery and alleviate them through experimentation. I’ll show how we can use the Theory of Constraints to spot bottlenecks and the core skills to help teams experiment more effectively. Working smarter will, in the short term, appear to limit your ability to deliver at speed or quality, but in the long term ends up giving you more of both.

And finally, how to develop a joint team understanding of speed and quality by leveraging the DORA key metrics of lead time, deployment frequency, mean time to recovery and change failure rate. By showing how these link to the speed and quality of your product, you can use these metrics to keep you on the path of working smarter.