Agility and quality

What’s Quality? This word has many meaning. For my purpose, quality is the industrial quality. In this way, the definition is “A quality product is delivery like is design by us selves or with the customer”. A producer who satisfies quality requirements doesn’t produce the best product.

When I work on a project with the Methods Agile, I realize a quality project. When I explain this idea in an interview in a company specialize in Agility, the director answer me that agility can’t offer quality.

If you consider the agile project as a whole, the project isn’t a quality project. Because you can modify the list of functionality when the customer needs to exchange a functionality less important by another more important at this time.

But if you watch the project with all this functionality, each functionality is realize with quality. And when you deliver all the functionality, you deliver the software. And the quality of the software depends only on the quality of each functionality.

Each sprint contains full functionalities and can be delivered. For quality, a sprint is an industrial batch which verifies the constraints of quality.

The quality is more important than in the Predictive Methods because the customer receives exactly what he needs. If he needs some functionality less important which the customer decides to abandon, the supplier can realize them in a second time.

For a customer, the most important thing is that the end user has the best productivity. The end user needs simple, complete and useful functionality. The view of the user is different of the view of programmer or analyst. He can’t see the complexity or simplicity of a function like the programmer and he see the software like a list of functionality not like a system.