What Drives Quality (Book & Agile Quality Coaching Cards)
What Drives Quality
A Deep Dive into Software Quality with Practical Solutions for Delivering High-Quality Products -- Second Edition
About the Book
Second Edition: Fully Revised and Extended!
What Drives Quality explores how quality plays a role in all of the software development activities. It takes a deep dive into quality by listing the relevant factors of development and management activities that drive the quality of software products. It provides a lean approach to quality by analyzing the full development chain from customer requests to delivering products to users.
I'm aiming this book at software developers and testers, architects, product owners and managers, agile coaches, Scrum masters, project managers, and operational and senior managers who consider quality to be important.
A book on quality should be practical. It should help you, the reader of this book, to improve the quality of your software and deliver better products. It should inspire you and give you energy to persevere on your quality journey. What drives quality tries to do just that, and more.
This book is based on my experience as a developer, tester, team leader, project manager, quality manager, process manager, consultant, coach, trainer, and adviser in Agile, Lean, Quality and Continuous Improvement. It takes a deep dive into quality with views from different perspectives and provides ideas, suggestions, practices, and experiences that will help you to improve quality of the products that your organization is delivering.
This book views software quality from an engineering, management, and social perspective. It explores the interaction between all involved in delivering high-quality software to users and provides ideas to do it quicker and at lower costs.
Three add-on packages are available with this book:
- Agile Quality Coaching Cards: 52 cards used by agile coaches and teams to investigate the quality of their products and the practices used to deliver software. With these cards, they can identify causes leading to insufficient quality and define actions to improve quality.
- Booklet Tools for Root Cause Analysis: 15 pages with practical processes, templates, checklists, and examples that help you to effectively analyze problems to identify the main causes that have led to them, and to initiate actions to prevent similar problems from occurring in the future.
- Agile Self-assessment Game: This card Game helps teams to discover how agile they are and what they can do to increase their agility. Organizations use the overall results from team assessments to decide where to invest in their agile transformation and decide what the next steps will be.
More options to buy my book and game can be found in my webstore.
Feedback on this book is very much appreciated. Please sent your suggestions, comments, ideas or questions to BenLinders@gmail.com.
This book is based on the blog series What Drives Quality by Ben Linders.
Packages
Book & Agile Quality Coaching Cards
Get the book What Drives Quality with the Agile Quality Coaching Cards: used by agile coaches and teams to investigate the quality of their products and the practices used to deliver software.
PDF
EPUB
WEB
English
The Book
PDF
EPUB
WEB
English
Book & RCA Booklet
Get the book What Drives Quality with the booklet Tools for Root Cause Analysis.
Includes:
Tools for Root Cause Analysis
How to effectively analyze problems to identify the main causes that have led to them, and to initiate actions to prevent similar problems from occurring in the future. Booklet with practical processes, templates, checklists, and examples.
PDF
EPUB
WEB
English
Book & Agile Self-assessment Game
Get the book What Drives Quality with the Agile Self-assessment Game: Assess how agile you are and what you can do to improve your agility.
Includes:
Agile Self-assessment Game
The Agile Self-assessment Game helps teams to discover how agile they are and what you can do to increase their agility. It’s a PDF download with images for 52 cards with statements and playing instructions that can be used by teams and organizations to self-assess their agility. The game can be played by teams to reflect on their own team interworking and agree upon the next steps for their agile journey.
PDF
EPUB
WEB
English
Bundles that include this book
Reader Testimonials

Bill Curtis
Director, Consortium for IT Software Quality
This book is a succinct summary of what we know about software quality and how to apply it. It can be read in "agile time", and delivers a solid overview that can set readers on course to higher quality, lower risk software. This book is a valuable contribution to professional software engineering practice. Half of the book is devoted to agile quality techniques. Ben’s objective is to make sure the speed of delivery is matched by the speed of assurance.

Jan van Moll
Senior Forensic Investigator, Head of Quality & Regulatory Philips Healthcare
What Drives Quality by Ben Linders provides an extremely valuable perception to its readers on how to deal with the development process, verification and validation activities in contemporary software development processes. Localizing and applying the practices discussed by Ben will significantly add to the level of maturity that is needed to ensure software quality in your own organization. This book a must-read for every software professional!

William R. Corcoran
Editor of The Firebird Forum
What Drives Quality" was a delight to read. It flows well. It is about a lot more than software quality, touching on many of the ideas that have been tried and true for quality in general. Ben Linders has a charming style of writing that is both challenging and thought provoking. I recommend the book for anyone who wants to achieve quality or wants to avoid being the victim of self-inflicted or other quality issues.

Shiv Sivaguru
Advisor and Coach, PM Power Consulting
Congratulations on putting together a veritable index of various resources related to understanding aspects that drive quality in a software development lifecycle. This is a must-read for all persons contributing to the development or enhancement of software.

Shane Hastie
Director of Agile Learning Programs at ICAgile
Ben’s book is a reflection of his deep knowledge and experience helping teams and organisations identify what quality is in software, why it matters and how to optimise the right qualities for a product. He explores how quality is impacted by the organisational processes and from the perspective of the individual contributor, and gives concrete, tangible advice on how to make better products which meet customer needs effectively. He does this in an entertaining and interesting writing style.

Eran Kinsbruner
technical evangelist at Perfecto
What Drives Quality is a one stop shop reference for software development and testing practitioners. Ben Linders shares highly useful and practical guidelines and recommendations that can help drive quality based decisions into any organization that is maturing its software development process. In addition, the book offers experience based case studies and pointers that can help the readers drive better quality into their agile practices.

Capers Jones
VP and Chief Technology Officer at Namcook Analytics LLC
This interesting book is a welcome addition to the agile literature. Ben's book also covers testing and other forms of software defect removal. Ben's book is somewhat congruent with my own older book, "The Economics of Software Quality". Up until Ben Linders' book agile averaged about 92.5% in removing bugs. Hopefully the tips and advice in Ben's book can raise agile DRE up above 97% which is the range of the TSP methodology. Overall Ben's book has good advice about improving software quality.

Gojo Adzic
partner at Neuri Consulting LLP
This book is a lovely collection of ideas for anyone looking to to improve their software development process.

Diomidis Spinellis
Professor of software engineering, programmer, and technology author
Many pieces of useful advice in an easy-to-read book.

Brandi Olson
Agile Strategy, Lean Data, and Coaching ,Brandi Olson Consulting
Ben's book is practical and actionable. It's a great foundation for agile beginners and also full of resources for advanced practitioners. I am already using the ideas in my coaching work with teams and their executive leaders.

Ilan Kirschenbaum
Co-Founder, Agile Coach at Practical agile
The book What Drives Quality provides a comprehensive and multi-faceted overview of how to increase the quality of software products. Whether you are a manager, programmer, programmer, or (naturally) a tester, this book will provide you with plenty of meaningful and practical ways you can enhance and drive quality at your organization. The book is generously sprinkled with links to articles and books that will help you dive deeper into the discussed topics.

Rik D'huyvetters
Senior Software Engineer at The Reference
This book is a roadmap to better software with advice for people at all levels of the organisation. I love that it’s not only based on agile practices, but also on what works in the field. Go buy it!

Paul Hookham
Interim IT Head of Delivery and Performance Improvement
Great content, full of do's and don'ts. It looks at quality and why it is so important to understand the customers' needs before deciding which approach to take. I enjoyed reading it and would recommend it to anyone who has an interest in software quality

Shirly Ronen-Harel
Co-Founder & Agile / DevOps Coach at WeChange
I like the fact that, finally, requirements practices are recognized in the book as part of quality. As an agile coach I give a lot of attention to them. And of course, the concept of the team as described in the book, which is an important driver for quality. i will recommend the book for sure.
Table of Contents
- Foreword by Bill Curtis
- Foreword by Jan van Moll
- Preface
- Introduction
- Why Quality Matters
-
Deep Dive Into Quality
- Requirements
- Architecture and Design
- Coding
- Review and Inspection
- Test
- Senior Management
- Operational Management
- Project Management
-
Driving Quality
- Knowing What to Measure
- Analyzing Measurements
- Measure Defects
- Project Defect Model
- Steering Quality in Agile
- Reduce Software Maintenance
- Root Cause Analysis in Software Development
-
Quality Software with Agile Teams
- Business Case for Quality with Agile
- Software Quality is Free
- Agile Quality Practices
- What If We Fail?
- Deliver High-Quality Software with Agile Teamwork
- Empower Teams to Increase Quality
- Working at a Sustainable Pace
- Increase the Quality of Software with Visual Management
- Improve Software Quality with Retrospectives
- Develop Your Software Quality Skills
- Agile Quality Coaching Cards
- About the Author
- Bibliography
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