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As a digital agency, we’re serious about the quality of our work. We’re proud of what we do and how we do it, but there is always room for improvement.
In a bid to continue strong progress, a concentrated team has been working to uncover where we are and where we might be going. To prevent tunnel vision, this team organised a retrospective to involve the wider Lab Digital collective. During this get-together, we were all invited to provide feedback on what we are good at and where we can do better.
The whole team wrote memos and grouped them on the board, and clear patterns emerged immediately.
We are happy with how our teams are involved in the creative processes. Ambitious about quality, but also willing to take a hard look at ourselves as we push new features and make key changes quickly and continuously.
On the other hand, keeping the big picture in mind is challenging when teams or individuals are strictly focused on tickets. Remaining responsible before and after deployment is challenging, especially when team members are sometimes transient. Moving forward, we discussed maintaining a deployment calendar coordinated by one of our testers, so we all know what is happening in which projects.
Code quality is a company-wide mantra. We use a lot of automated testing strategies: aggressive linters, unit-tests, integration tests, functional tests, and even visual test-tools for catching unexpected front-end changes.
However, sometimes testing by developers is too narrow and only focused on the issue at hand. Cross-device impact, and broader site-wide or application-wide impact may be overlooked. Quality assurances such as code-review and concise change-logs tend to be skipped when time is short and the pressure has mounted. It requires constant discipline from the team to ensure that this does not happen.
We strive to be on top of all new testing approaches, before and after deployment. Before deployment, it is about automated and human-driven testing. After deployment, testers are still heavily involved — but we also use several tools to provide us with visibility of the behaviour and performance of our applications. These tools include New Relic, Grafana and Sentry.
Still, when testers discover issues, it’s critical that they provide clear explanations in tickets for what they did, what happened, and what should have happened. Testing is a discipline that is being improved at Lab Digital as we integrate it more closely to the development process.
We are expanding our team in this area to achieve even better quality!
Our designers are always involved during sprints, to visually verify the output against their designs. Spending more time on providing responsive designs up front results in client-approved designs, preventing front-end developers from having to flesh out their own solutions and ideas. This minimises the potential for later modifications to align with the design team’s vision.
This is a continuous process, and finding the right balance is key (not everything needs to be designed :-)).
Separation of concerns is strictly maintained between client and DTAP environments. Monitoring and visibility of all these environments and important events is quickly expanding.
The most important aspects to improve involve helping and embracing our customers, whilst adding extra value. This will mean sometimes maintaining content, and always watching over the design and consistency of pages and other content. Similarly, we aim to help set up and interpret A/B testing and heat-map tooling. This expertise will build our relationship with clients.
Generally, involving our clients more, and empathising deeply whilst taking a critical look at their application or site, is expected go a long way in achieving what we love to do: making our customers happy!
We’re working on it! The most important conclusion of our session was that overall, we’re happy with how we currently produce high-quality projects. But we all see areas for improvement; either for being more efficient, for reducing the probability of bugs in production, or for improving the overall conversion rate of our projects.