Put the effort in the process, so there is less need for quality control later.
Part of the goal with the collaboration rules is to set up a team process to build quality into the work. This means you have fewer defects later in the process, when they are harder to fix. By doing the work in thin, vertical slices, that are frequently merged together, it is harder for defects to hide.
This doesn’t mean you won’t find bugs. It should mean that you have fewer of them.
It does mean going slower at the start as the team put these quality building processes in place. The payoffs, in my opinion, and from what I’ve seen others write, and heard at events, are worth the investment.
Balance your process with tests
The process you put in for doing the work, the quality assurance, if you will, should be followed up by quality control. This should happen in the form of tests: unit tests, integration tests, end-to-end tests, and exploratory testing too.
Some of these tests will be done by the developers as unit tests. The integration and end-to-end tests might be done as part of their code commits as automated testing. Exploratory testing might be done by others to see what happens with the app with irregular inputs, or other issues. Each of these should be happening as part of the feedback loops in the team.
These tests are there to catch issues before the code is released. They also build in a safety net for refactoring too, so that the code can be modified to improve its structure, and still produce the same outputs.
It’s never to late to improve your process
Teams can improve their process as soon as they decide where to start. If they didn’t set up a good process at the start, then they can start tomorrow.
The team can discuss the situation, and find an easy place to start, and then move on from there. This can be part of the retrospective and continuous improvement work.
Where would you start with your team? Who will you speak to about this?
This post is part of a project pulling together my materials and ideas about Teaching Team Collaboration: the Human-Side of Software Development for software development to students.
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The ideas above are from my book 101+ Ideas to Improve Team Collaboration, which covers all of these little things that students can do to improve their collaboration. Also available via Kindle.