W. Edwards Deming - Out of the Crisis

It doesn’t matter if you’re in manufacturing, running a restaurant or developing software, one of the biggest boosts to any business is in reducing rework. The output is better quality, employees are happier and removing rework cycles increases throughput.

In software delivery this is conceptually a solved problem - have cross functional teams building software following the principles of CD and the barrier to entry is low. Yet this is still not the default for many organisations, both enterprise and startup.

We’re nearly 40 years after the publication of Out of the Crisis, which on page 1 starts with the observation that producing higher quality work increases productivity. Deming has been talking about this since the 1950s. Accelerate (2018) backed this up with solid survey analysis.

At this point, if engineers are regularly performing rework to meet compliance or reliability goals it talks to ignorance of 70 year old knowledge at a management level.