Exploring the Culture of Quality

A well-engineered approach to quality isn’t just about processes and tools; it’s about people. Culture plays a significant role in shaping how quality is perceived, prioritised, and embedded into an organisation’s day-to-day operations. Understanding this cultural landscape is essential for driving meaningful, lasting improvements in quality engineering.

Assessing Collaboration and Ownership of Quality

Quality isn’t the responsibility of a single team or role; it’s a collective effort that should be woven into all aspects of development and delivery. To assess how collaboration and ownership manifest in your organisation, consider:

• How do different teams interact when discussing quality-related topics?
• Are conversations about quality proactive or reactive?
• Does quality naturally integrate into development workflows, or does it feel like an afterthought?

Observing team interactions during stand-ups, planning meetings, and development processes can provide invaluable insights into how quality is prioritised (or deprioritised) across different functions.

Identifying Strengths and Areas for Improvement

Understanding where quality is thriving and where it’s struggling requires a keen eye for patterns in communication and execution. Key aspects to evaluate include:

• Consistency in communication: Are expectations around quality clearly articulated across teams?
• Code reviews and ticket management: Are they structured to encourage high-quality contributions?
• Integration of quality in decision-making: Are quality concerns discussed alongside feature development, or are they raised too late in the process?

Teams that openly discuss and integrate quality into their workflows are more likely to maintain high standards and improve continuously. Identifying inconsistencies can help pinpoint areas that need more attention.

Evaluating Psychological Safety and Quality Conversations

The way teams talk about quality reveals a lot about organisational culture. Are people comfortable raising quality concerns? Do they feel heard when they do? Psychological safety plays a crucial role in how freely individuals share insights, flag risks, and collaborate on improvements.

Key questions to explore:

• Are concerns about quality raised without fear of blame or repercussions?
• Do teams feel ownership over quality, or do they see it as someone else’s problem?
• Are quality issues discussed in retrospective meetings with a focus on learning rather than fault-finding?

A culture that encourages open dialogue and learning from mistakes is one that fosters long-term quality improvements.

Mapping Quality Responsibilities Across Teams

One of the most revealing exercises in understanding quality culture is mapping out who owns what. The Quality Role Clarity Matrix helps visualise the distribution of responsibilities, highlighting areas of overlap, gaps, and misalignment.

• Are quality responsibilities clearly defined and shared across teams?
• Do engineers, testers, product managers, and leadership have a shared understanding of their roles in ensuring quality?
• Where are the bottlenecks, and who holds the authority to unblock them?

Outputs of This Stage

By the end of this step, you should have:

• A Quality Culture Assessment: A report summarising observations of team collaboration, communication, and quality discussions.
• An Observational Report: Notes from team interactions that highlight strengths and improvement opportunities.
• A Quality Role Clarity Matrix: A structured view of how quality responsibilities are distributed and where gaps or overlaps exist.

Why This Matters

Exploring the culture of quality goes beyond surface-level assessments; it uncovers the underlying dynamics that shape how teams think about and act on quality. Without this understanding, even the best processes and tools can fall short.

With these insights in hand, the next step final before establishing a shared quality strategy that brings together technical, cultural, and organisational elements. The broad technical appraisal of tooling and technical debt, as well as the positioning of quality as an accelerator, rather than a cost. That will be the focus of the next article in this series: Analysing the Quality Landscape