Everyone is Responsible

In high performing organisations, nothing is “somebody else’s problem.” Developers are responsible for the quality and stability of the software they build. Operations teams are responsible for helping developers build quality in. Everyone works together to achieve the organisational level goals, rather than optimising for what’s best for their team or department.

When people make local optimisations that reduce the overall performance of the organisation, it’s often due to systemic problems such as poor management systems such as annual budgeting cycles, or incentives that reward the wrong behaviours. A classic example is rewarding developers for increasing their velocity or writing more code, and rewarding testers based on the number of bugs they find.

Most people want to do the right thing, but they will adapt their behaviour based on how they are rewarded. Thus the importance of creating fast feedback loops from the things that really matter: how customers react to what we build for them, and the impact on our organisation.