When "Everyone" Owns Quality, No One Does

Why "Quality is Everyone’s Responsibility" Undermines Quality Cultures - And What to Do Instead.

"Quality is everyone’s responsibility." It’s a phrase I’ve heard countless times from engineering teams. It sounds good - progressive, even - but what does it really mean in practice?

Teams that say this often genuinely believe that everyone in the team cares about quality. If you asked any team member, each would enthusiastically say yes, quality is really important, and they work hard to do their best job. However, therein lies the problem. Doing your job well and hoping everyone else does, too, doesn't guarantee high-quality products. It's how your work integrates and supports the others in your team and beyond that determines the quality of your products and services.

From What do Quality Engineers do? :

One aspect of quality we often miss is that quality is an emergent system behaviour. You can not inspect the individual subsystems and deduce the overall quality attributes of the more extensive system. You have to take a holistic view of the subsystem components and their interactions to understand how the system behaves and, therefore, how its quality attributes are likely to manifest.

This means that you can't just build quality into your team's subsystem and hope that will lead to an overall high-quality software system. The interactions between subsystems and how they align with user expectations are crucial, and this requires teams to think beyond their immediate tasks and take a more collaborative, system-wide approach. In addition, because quality is emergent, users' perceptions of quality can change from interaction to interaction due to changes in the environment that are outside of your control.

When teams and organisations say quality is everyone's responsibility, they can unintentionally neglect the overall system quality, which is how one of your most important stakeholders, the users, experiences your software system.

Why do we do it?

After all, it’s easy to see why this idea is so appealing—it suggests collective accountability and a shared commitment to doing excellent work. I can appreciate the appeal of teams saying quality is everyone's reasonability. It sounds good. It shows how progressive a team you are, that you've moved beyond quality just being a single person and towards collective responsibility. It signals to others how you like to think about your team: that you're high-performing and do excellent work.

The Pitfalls of Diffused Responsibility

But simply saying we don't have a single person responsible for quality, it's everyone's, usually results in fewer people caring about quality and championing it, not more. This can result in quality falling to the lowest priority or never being thought about until something goes wrong.

The other issue is that quality means so many things to so many people that most teams probably can't agree on what those responsibilities even are. So, saying quality is everyone's responsibility can become an impossible goal.

But here's where we have a bigger problem: In order to create high-quality software systems, we need quality to be everyone's responsibility. There is no way one team, let alone a person, can be responsible for quality, especially if quality is an emergent behaviour. So what do we do?

Making Quality Everyone’s Responsibility