Fostering a quality quality culture, Adam Howard at NZ Tech Rally 2023

NZ Tech Rally 2023 was a tremendous success, with top-notch speakers and genuinely useful and entertaining content.

A particular pleasure for me was Adam Howard’s talk titled Fostering a quality quality culture. Adam and I were team mates and I was lucky to see Adam and his team transform Xero’s approach to quality engineering. This talk, and the model Adam describes boils several years of experimentation and hard work in to a succinct, repeatable framework for improving practices by enabling communities of practice inside an organisation.

Adam’s blurb:

Quality is a slippery notion, and not something that can simply be manufactured and measured. In that sense, it’s a lot like culture.

And just as culture is emergent from a peoples’ values and behaviours, quality emerges from teams’ principles and practices.

In this talk, Adam describes a model for shaping those principles and practices in engineering teams that can nurture a culture of quality engineering.