Velocity through quality

ImageThe fundamental axiom of New Ways Of Working And Managing (NWOWAM, pronounced "wow, man!")is "Velocity Through Quality".

It is possible to work faster by taking short cuts and compromising quality so that you push a wave of defects ahead of yourself into production and accrue technical debt over time. Obviously this approach is not sustainable as eventually the technical debt will overwhelm you. In fact it is a vicious circle or a death spiral where the decreasing quality of production means increasing unplanned work, which further forces us to compromise the quality of our future work.

The only sustainable way to increase the velocity of work is to increase quality so that we reduce the technical debt over time, so that we buy ourselves more time by reducing unplanned work so that we can invest in improving how we work, which in turn further increases quality, and so on in a virtuous circle.

Therefore the official motto of Teal Unicorn is “velocitas per qualitatem” (Thanks to Eric McElroy @esmcelroy for helping me translate it.)

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