High Quality Crap That No One Wants

Thanks to a Twitter friend, I got to read this article about the effect that the introduction of Six Sigma practices often have on creativity. The title of the article is "How To Kill Innovation", and I think that the writer pretty much nails it.

That sort of quality-first, process-focused attitude toward software development was championed by one particular individual at my last job, although it wasn't formally characterized as Six Sigma until an American executive adherent of that strategy began pushing it. That was right around the time that I got fed up and quit, so I didn't actually have to live through the two years of bureaucracy that followed. But I certainly heard enough about it.

With our introduction of Agile in 2006, we (perhaps naively) wanted to deliver quality as measured by the customers' satisfaction with what they got. Any time you try to formalize the production of "quality" by automating the creative process, you're screwed before you begin. I could enthusiastically get behind the notion of "inspect and adapt"; I suspect that I would've wilted in an environment dedicated to predictability.