Impact of Prioritization on Quality

A key aspect of building quality software is ensuring that it does what the users need it to do. In my experience, the backlog of feature request (whether written or held in the stakeholders’ heads) is always much larger than what the development team can build in a short period of time. However, prioritizing these features seems to be difficult for people. Everything seems important, so everything gets priority 1.

Of course, if everything has the same priority, the stakeholders are de facto allowing the development team to prioritize the features. This can be a problem because the development team often doesn’t have the visibility to all of the factors that may determine the importance of the feature to the company’s success.

Here’s one example of a client who had an issue with prioritization, and how we arrived at a working solution.

Going Live too Early

A client had a new system replacing an existing business critical system. Unfortunately, their existing system had reached its technical limits before the new system was fully tested, and management made the decision to go live without much testing. Of course, the results were predictable. There were many errors in a production system that had to be fixed right away.

The “prioritization” method initially was that end users would come into the room of developers and tell them that they needed to drop everything and work on whatever issue the end user mentioned. The problem was that many different users were coming in each hour, and the developers didn’t get a chance to finish any task before being told to drop it and work on something else.

Getting Organized for Quality

The first thing we did was set up a SharePoint list where users could report their issues. We created a process where the users would report their issues in SharePoint. Then, I would triage the list and assign the work to developers. This simple improvement resulted in a huge increase in productivity for the development team because they could complete tasks without interruption.

However, we weren’t always working on the most important issues. Users were choosing the priority, and every issue was the highest priority to that user. Even when we met with representatives from all departments together and set definitions for priorities, every issue was priority 1 on a 3-priority scale.

Priority Names Matter

Our original 3 priority levels were called “High”, “Medium”, and “Low”. Because all issues were production issues, people didn’t want to minimize any by calling them “Medium” or “Low”. Everyone agreed that the issues were not all the same priority, but they weren’t willing to prioritize using those names.

First, the client came up with a category called “Priority 1 – Urgent”. This was higher than “Priority 1” and the client felt comfortable putting some items in Priority 1, and some in Priority 1 – Urgent. Still, way too many items were in Priority 1 – Urgent, so the development team was still choosing the priority.

Then, the client decided that the most critical items would be in a new priority called “Priority 0”. This was reserved for the top 5-7 issues to be worked on immediately by our 5-person development team.

This worked! The client was completely willing to prioritize into “Priority 0”, “Priority 1 – Urgent”, and “Priority 1” even though they were not willing to prioritize into “Priority 1”, “Priority 2”, and “Priority 3”. Just by changing the names of the priority levels, we were able to accomplish the goal of dividing the issues into 3 different levels.

We could then focus on the issues that brought the most value to the system.

Feedback

What challenges have you had with prioritizing features? What actions have you tried to address the challenges? I’d love to hear your stories from the trek.