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Talk

Speed vs. Quality: can you have both? 

Jitesh Gosai


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. (245 words/1416 chars)

Key takeaways

  • How to use the DORA key metrics to create a shared understanding of speed and quality
  • How to identify bottlenecks to speed and quality using the Theory of Constraints
  • Five core skills to enable practical experimentation in teams

SPeaker Bio

Jitesh Gosai’s expertise in testing spans over two decades, during which he has partnered with various organisations to scale up their testing and automation processes. As the Principal Tester at BBC’s iPlayer & Sounds department, Jitesh works with multiple teams, including those dedicated to Mobile, TV, Web, and Smart Speakers. He aims to help teams build quality into their products and cultivate a Culture of Quality. In his leisure time, he shares his experiences at conferences across Europe and in his newsletter https://qualityeng.substack.com/ and LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jitgo/