Essential Lean - Avoiding Defects Goal Guidance (example)

Here's an example of guidance: what should be our approach related to the Avoiding Defects goal?

Assess the impact – The impact of this waste type should be estimated and measured. The complexity and criticality of the product should influence quality politics. Specific parts of the architecture or specific components may have a higher criticality and/or a higher impact of the defects. An identical feature - for example, importing and processing data from an XML file could be more or less critical depending on the business that it serves. 

Find root causes - some usual suspects are the following:

• Work is more difficult because of an unnecessary big scope or because of task switching
• No build-in quality
• Poor skills  

Find industry recommended practices 

• First, make the work easy by avoiding Big Inventory, Overprocessiong, and Overproduction 
• Foster built-in quality by adopting clean architecture, clean code, TDD, refactoring, reuse engineering
• Improve skills: collaborative work practices, coding standards

Find references for adapting to the context  - For example, use Disciplined Agile Delivery guidance (options and tradeoffs) for process goals such as Test Strategy, Improve Quality, Grow Team Members. For example, one Improve Quality aspect is Improve Implementation where you have these options: refactor code, refactor database, refactor UI, rewrite, or accept some technical debt [1].     

Experiment and find your best solution in context - Here some examples:

• For a legacy product you can do the following:
• refactor modules with a high impact and a high rate of change
• add code reviews and tests for these most important modules
• adopt guidelines to avoid fragile code in the future. 
• For a new product you can do the following:
• build up the member's skills
• start with a clean architecture, clean code, and test first
• adopt some guidelines to preserve the robustness of the product
• prevent situations that require big refactoring.   

Essential Lean Series

Read first: Principles of lean thinking (by Mary Poppendieck)   

Essentializing Lean - essay

Essential Lean - Searching for a definition

Essential Lean - Analyzing existent solutions

Essential Lean - Goal-Driven Lean

Essential Lean - Avoiding Defects Goal Guidance (example)

Essential Lean - Waste avalanche effect

Essential Lean - Red Flags

References

[1] - Choose your WoW: A Disciplined Agile Delivery Handbook for Optimizing Your Way of Working, Chapter 18 Improve Quality. Publisher: Project Management Institute (June 1, 2020) , by Scott Ambler, Mark Lines