Is your team struggling with quality?
1/15/2008
Sorry but this post isn't going to be the answer to your woes! We have been having some issues I feel centered around a quality and attitude during our project, and whilst reading through various articles I came across this story which really strikes a chord on our project....

My first real job was working as a junior field engineer for an oil service company. It involved lowering instruments on the end of a cable 30,000 feet or so down a bore hole, to determine the exact depth of the well's oil bearing zones. Once this had been done, some high explosives were detonated at these depths to get oil to flow into the bore hole and thereby validate our measurements. The company was paid a huge amount of money to perform this service, and I was under a lot of pressure to come up with accurate answers in the shortest possible time. I had a small team of people to help me, so I didn't have to do much manual work, but one of the tasks I was not allowed to delegate was connecting up the explosives. This involved attaching a detonator to the end of some primer cord that ran to the shaped charges in the gun. In order to get an efficient transfer of the detonator's explosive power, it was necessary to make a clean cut at the end of the primer cord so that it could be pushed into the detonator and sit flat against the fuse.I had successfully fired hundreds of these perforating guns, until one day when I failed to make the cleanest of cuts through the primer cord because the blade of my knife was blunt. The problem only became apparent an hour later, after the shaped charges failed to detonate. It cost me three hours of rig time to retrieve the gun, make a repair, and then lower it down the bore hole again. This was not the first time my old knife had let me down, so I hurled it into the well-site mud in disgust, resolving to buy a new one as soon as I got back to town.During the long journey back from the well site, I started to think about buying the new knife, and this made me consider the sort of tool my friend, Mark Barfield, used to cut primer cord. He was someone who always seemed to do things right. Mark wouldn't just buy a new tool; he would also learn how to use and maintain it properly. Then I started to realize that the root cause of my problems lay with me and my values rather than with the knife. The reason Mark succeeded more often than I did was not because he had better tools, but because his values were superior to mine. He put quality at the center of everything he did. I didn't need a new knife as much as a better set of values in my life, and this is something I'm still struggling to put into practice 25 years later.

Its taken from the following book, available here at Amazon.

Visual Studio Team System: Better Software Development for Agile Teams



Keywords: Scrum Quality

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