Got a Morale Problem? Get Quality!

The connection between product quality and morale isn't a big mystery, but it seems to be one that is frequently overlooked. W. Edwards Deming and, somewhat later, Frederick Herzberg famously linked the sense of accomplishment people experience when doing good work on projects over which they are able to control how the work is done with high morale. Scrum's emphasis on delivering a working product increment at the end of each Sprint fits into the morale equation perfectly.

So what's the problem?

We don't always do as we should. When teams are pushed to take on more work than they can competently deliver, quality is the inevitable casualty. Teams that find more and more of their capacity sucked away by bug-fixing rapidly experience significant, sometimes catastrophic, declines in morale. With morale goes innovation, productivity, and continuity as people seek to flee the bug storm.

An even worse situation occurred in one company's misguided attempt to focus on its defect backlog while at the same time delivering new features at their accustomed pace. The solution they settled on was to create a bug-fixing "team" -- actually a large work group -- that would, in essence, clean up the messes left by the over-worked feature group. Freed from the responsibility for the quality of their work, the feature group delivered a large number of features. Unfortunately, the feature group's freedom from responsibility produced a product strangled by defects which the poor souls on the bug-fixing work group couldn't hope to save. Both sides blamed the other for the rotten product quality and morale throughout the company hit absolute rock-bottom. An attempt to introduce Scrum into this situation failed because of the maelstrom of blame, mistrust, horrible morale, and fear of change.

The highest morale I have had the privilege to share in occurred on Scrum teams that were allowed to play by the rules of Scrum: only pulling in the work that the team members could commit to, failing tests were simply an indication of "not done," and nothing that was "not done" ever saw the light of day. The company provided adequate support for continuous integration, TDD, refactoring, and other good engineering practices, which allowed the teams to work without fear of unintended consequences. When a bug did surface, as bugs inevitably will, the team that produced it was responsible both for the fix and the tests to prove the fix. The teams in this organization felt the same degree of ownership and satisfaction when fixing bugs as when developing new features. In short, their morale was in the stratosphere. Their quality was also spectacular.

So the next time you notice one or more teams suffering from poor morale, work on quality. Fix the quality problem and the response to an inquiry about morale will almost certainly be "what morale problem?"

All for now....

...-.-