Happiness is Quality

Each organisation has a culture which directly affects the quality of their work. Organisations with a lower level of quality; that is, systems that fail more often, longer times to fix and longer times to build often have a few things in common; frustration, apathy and cynicism.

On the other side of the coin, teams with slack, time to learn and time to reflect also have the space to improve their systems. Quality is everyone’s responsibility is an oft quoted phrase. But, how do you actually engage people to build quality systems?

Improving quality should not weigh heavy on the shoulders of the test specialist. Their main role should not be attempting to convince people that unit tests should exist, that systems should be testable and observable or that automated tests will speed up development. Instead, we should be building teams that want to find out together how to build a system that breathes quality.

The way to do this is by improving the happiness of the engineers on the team with learning, autonomy and coaching. So, how can we build teams that strive to build quality systems? By building in happiness early and often. In this talk, we will go on a journey of looking at how to improve happiness in teams for the end goal of building quality systems.