Continuous Quality: Shortening the Development and Test Feedback Loop Beyond Continuous Build

would encourage you to find one thing you want to improve in your automation infrastructure and bring it to your next retrospective or iteration planning meeting. Try to establish a cadence where the team can address automation work within the iteration. As you focus on reasonable levels of automation, you will be able to improve your quality by having the feedback loops to understand what check-ins are negatively affecting quality, and go faster by fixing those issues while the team is still in context.  

About the Author:  As VP of Products for Rally Software, Zach Nies brings close to 20 years of engineering and product development experience to Rally's Agile lifecycle management solutions. Prior to joining Rally, Zach served as Principal Architect and Director of Systems Architecture for Level 3 Communications and founded a small start up which was quickly acquired by the publicly traded Creo, Inc, now a division of Kodak. He also served as Chief Software Architect at Quark, where he provided the overarching technological vision for the company. Zach's product vision has won numerous industry awards, including Jolt Product Excellence awards, Seybold HotPicks and the prized MacWorld Best of Show. Zach has served on standards bodies such as the W3C's HTML working group and currently serves on the board of directors for Agile Denver. At the age of 13, Zach began commercially publishing software and, at age 16, started a successful consulting business. A Boettcher Scholar, Zach received his BS with distinction in Computer Science Engineering from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He spends his spare time tuning his golf swing and spending time with his family.