What Developers Get Wrong About Application Quality

What if focusing on quality actually made you ship features faster? This talk reframes quality as the ultimate accelerator for development.

#1about 3 minutes

Shifting focus from features to the end-to-end process

Developers often get trapped focusing only on features, but true quality requires considering the entire code-to-cloud journey for the end user.

#2about 2 minutes

Debunking common myths about application quality

Quality is not a slow support activity or someone else's job, but rather a strategic practice of quality engineering focused on automation.

#3about 6 minutes

Treating quality as a feature to increase development speed

Viewing quality as a core feature meets high user expectations and ultimately saves time by reducing future toil and unplanned work.

#4about 1 minute

Advancing your career with a strategic quality mindset

Moving into leadership roles requires a strategic mindset that connects application quality and automation to broader business goals and user adoption.

#5about 3 minutes

Understanding the "shift left" movement and developer responsibility

The shift left trend makes developers responsible for their services in production, which improves efficiency by addressing issues earlier in the lifecycle.

#6about 2 minutes

Exploring the four key dimensions of application quality

A comprehensive quality strategy involves four interconnected dimensions: testing, monitoring, incident response, and business metrics.

#7about 6 minutes

Going beyond unit tests with modern application testing

Effective testing includes code quality scans, security vulnerability checks, and synthetic user monitoring to prevent operational drift and improve UX.

#8about 5 minutes

The developer's role in modern monitoring and observability

Developers are responsible for instrumenting code to generate high-quality logs, metrics, traces, and spans needed for effective observability.

#9about 1 minute

Improving incident response to make on-call less painful

Since developers are always on-call for their code, providing better context through instrumentation helps find the right person faster and reduces MTTR.

#10about 3 minutes

Using DORA metrics to measure engineering's business impact

DORA metrics connect development activities like deploy frequency and change failure rate directly to business value and help identify technical debt.

#11about 3 minutes

Leveraging feature flags and adopting a quality mindset

Feature flags enable safe testing in production, and adopting a code-to-cloud mindset ensures your application reflects a commitment to quality.

#12about 4 minutes

Q&A: How to scale quality practices in large teams

In large organizations, SREs should act as stewards who guide developers through service onboarding and maturity checklists to ensure quality at scale.

#13about 2 minutes

Q&A: Defining effective service level objectives (SLOs)

Effective SLOs combine standard RED metrics (rate, error, duration) with service-specific indicators that define the application's contract with users.

#14about 5 minutes