Most devs in the team don't care about quality
Hello,
today a dev came to me stating that he is very unhappy with the rest of the teams performance. They are doing testing wrong, are not looking for alternative solutions, do stuff because they are told without thinking for themselves (which is definitely not a stance that we want or promote, it just seems that they don't care or want to).
There is silence in a lot of meetings and not so much participation in general. In retrospectives we can't reach a deeper level of problems because once we go there suddenly it was this one time thing or no one can say what the source of the problem was and it becomes incredibly tedious, no matter the format.
They have every room to address this but apparently they do not seem to care about meeting the professional standards, at least that's how said developer described it to me.
Now what I want to do is have a meeting with everybody and a) talk about the importance of quality and b) create a common understanding of our quality and rewrite our DoD. For example, what do we expect when someone writes tests, how should they be structured etc. All of this should be known by the way, so either they have forgotten it or are lazy/stupid, which I refuse to believe :)
I have also read about the empathy canvas a few posts earlier, which I may use as well.
Do you maybe have any other suggestions how to approach this? Anyone used some methods for this that have proven successful?
Cheers :)
Are they including TDD and/or BDD in the Definition of Done?
It seems like the silence and lack of participation is a bigger issue, indicating that the team can't self-organize and self-manage around what to work on and how to work on it. Facilitating discussions about quality and the Definition of Done would be good, but those discussions would be more effective if the team is able to have open and honest conversations and self-manage how they work. I would invest more time and energy into understanding these problems and their root causes so they can be addressed. After this, improvements to the team's way of working will be more impactful because the team will have more ownership of their way of working.
Are there users and or stakeholders in the Sprint Review? Are the quality problems visible in the Sprint Review? If yes, how is the reaction of the stakeholders? If not, why are they not visible?