Putting Quality Back in Agile With Lean

The agile manifesto and lean practices are very complementary, lean can be a useful addition to a very strong agile process to increase quality, argued Renaud Wilsius. Interviewing real clients or client proxies to deeply understand their pain points and visualizing the process by diving into the handovers between departments helped one company to uncover problems faster and fix those problems more efficiently for a lower price.

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Renaud Wilsius, R\u0026amp;D director at BISAM, spoke about applying lean practices in an Agile Environment to focus on quality at the Lean IT Summit 2017. InfoQ is covering this conference with Q\u0026amp;As, summaries and articles.

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InfoQ interviewed Wilsius after his talk about how they applied lean with agile and the results that they got.

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InfoQ: At the summit you spoke about having quality issues, can you describe the situation?

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Renaud Wilsius: As a Software Editor BISAM, a FactSet Company, has always taken product quality very seriously. We adopted eXtreme Programming back in 2006 and since then we use pair-programming 100% of the time. This practice has been completed by a test first approach where developers write tests before writing business logic. To support this test first approach, we built a powerful testing framework which supports today more than 20k tests.

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However, quality has not been at the expected level at the genesis of our lean project. Software complexity has been increasing as we onboarded new clients. Many technical combinations lead us to test almost an infinite number of possible cardinalities, moreover more clients with different patterns of product usage also led to an increasing need for client data to reproduce the issues they are experiencing. As data is client property, databases are very large and since our software is mostly deployed on premises it is not possible to request client data.

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Client loved our product, which they found very comprehensive and they love the new features. But none of them wanted to take the early versions, they faced a lot of installation issues and were more and more complaining about a growing number of open tickets without any remediation plan.

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InfoQ: What made you decide to go for a lean approach to solve the issues?

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Wilsius: Our mandate to solve this situation came from our top management, and the KPI of that project was visible to the private equity who owned most of our company. The nice thing about being in the spotlight is that we were fully supported by our hierarchy to make our choices, and they were ready to invest to show a fast and visible turnaround.

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We looked at the option of offloading our quality assurance to an external team and met a couple of highly qualified companies who came with a bunch of recommendations. This approach was very convenient to articulate/explain to our client: \"we had a quality issue, we identified the issue and we will put a team on it who will fix it. We are spending $ X on it, and here is a laundry list of what they will do for us to ensure this quality reputation never surfaces ever again\".

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Nevertheless, our R\u0026amp;D managers and I did not feel right about an approach to \"externalize our problems\". Assuming those companies managed to build this perfect \"quality wall\