Pablo Rodriguez-Bertorello, Author at Agile Canon

Breaking into Quality: Prioritization as a Pitfall

Our team kept solving the easy stuff, the big deliverables seemed to take forever, and would inevitably come out with major bugs. Do the right things right… Why not just do that? For any one product, a number of people and processes come together. We automatically operated by priority, and this turned out to be the central problem. The chart below shows a 66% reduction in our severe bug rate since then.

It seemed to be the right thing: when a customer reports a bug of high priority, jump on it. When a server crashes, jump on it. When the senior person finds a critical bug, jump on it.

In our meetings, the teams decided that instead of “Priority” being our call to action, we should “order” our work, always consuming our backlog from first to last. Yet, we kept jumping on it.

Exponential Case Study: 3 Benefits from Agility

Senex Rex case studies help clients better understand the benefits and challenges of agility. Here is a perspective from Pablo Martin Rodriguez-Bertorello, Chief Innovation Officer of Exponential. Senex Rex trained Exponential’s executives, managers, engineers and product management staff to deeply understand agile theory and practice, so Exponential could stand alone with no further external training or coaching. Our mission is to effect permanent change, not maintain change. We are proudest when we leave the building and our clients advance rapidly on their own. —Dan Greening, Senex Rex Managing Director

Exponential adopted Scrum in July 2014, and rapidly achieved three great outcomes. We dramatically increased the rate we completed features, reduced our bug density and reduced our release duration. These outcomes followed a mass company training by Senex Rex, and deep executive commitment. No external coaching following Senex Rex training was required.