In product development, spending time on features over quality depends heavily on the stage of development that you are in and the composition and balance of your team. Here are the top tips for time allocation for features vs. quality:
- In general, a good mix is to spend 60-70% of the team’s time on features, and 30-40% of the team’s time on quality improvements and reducing technical debt.
- If you are at an early stage and creating a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), it’s ok and typical to spend 80-90% of your team’s time on features and 10-20% on quality. Your main goal is to validate your ideas quickly with your key stakeholders and potentially early adopters to gain feedback and direction.
- If you have a buggy and unstable product, amplify the focus on quality to be 40-50% of the team’s time and reduce the feature development time to 50-60%. Utilize boosted quality 1-2 sprints of 60% quality time to get back to respectability. Some teams may even consider feature freezes and to focus 100% on quality for a limited duration of time.
- Keep the feature vs. quality conversation fluid with your team in daily stand-ups and iteration reviews so everyone in the team is aware of quality metrics throughout the product development lifecycle. It’s not just QA’s job. Everyone in the team is accountable.
- Never forget: Without quality, you don’t have a product. Users will find alternatives.
Check out the Features vs. Quality tip video from The Wild West of Software Project Management series below.