You're facing team members who prioritize speed over quality. How can you ensure long-term design excellence?

Long term design excellence can be maintained by ensuring certain practices are followed periodically. 1st being, before code, ensure developer spends time on designing the solution first. Then 2nd step will be to ensure pair-programming or peer code reviews to catch defective coding styles leading to code and design smells. Finally, it is important to re-factor and prune the code from time to time to make it remain robust and reduce the technical debt build-ups. Lastly, quality is a mindset and speed is just a notion, if we can drill this message within our developers, half the battle is already won.

Few things - - demonstrating how technical debts getting added in future courses of work defeats the purpose of speed - Defining proper mandatory checklist with properly defined metrics to be followed by the team - No code merge happening if proof of checklist submission is missing - Conduct regular design reviews to assess adherence to quality standards and identify potential improvements. Remember, it is a journey from doing to being when you are trying to create a culture.

I would add the importance of highlighting successful projects where design played a crucial role in achieving business objectives. It's always a good idea to look back at your best moments to see what worked well and what you can continue doing. I would also encourage building relationships to foster open communication with team members to understand their perspectives and find common ground.

Ensuring long-term design excellence in a speed-focused team requires a multifaceted approach. Establishing clear standards, fostering a culture of quality, leveraging agile practices, investing in training, using automation tools, encouraging collaboration, and setting realistic deadlines are all essential strategies. By implementing these measures, teams can maintain a high standard of quality while meeting the demands for timely delivery.

Earlier in the project, long before the planned release date, if the project involves a great deal of requirements analysis risk or architectural design risk, prioritize speed according to the principle of fail fast, fail cheap. Learning quickly mitigates the above types of risk, which are essential to quality of requirements and quality of design. After this period of architectural elaboration, the focus shifts to quality of implementation.

To implement Agile, start with short sprints and use Scrum to organize tasks and priorities. Encourage constant feedback and regular reviews to ensure continuous improvement. Apply Lean principles to eliminate waste and enhance efficiency. Additionally, integrate DevOps practices to streamline collaboration and automate testing and deployment processes. With these approaches, you'll create an environment where speed and quality balance, leading to better results and greater customer satisfaction.

Agile is a great technique to execute and measure the progress of a project. However Agile needs to be setup carefully. The definition of the swim lanes and adapting the Agile to the development culture of a company or group is very important. It is also critical that the Agile methodology works in synch with the project management, the quality and the source code control.

Emphasize the increasing costs of fixing a defect found in design review, unit test, code inspection ... all the way to field-found issues (I'm sure your SQA lead has a slide on that, somewhere). Then there's the cost of maintaining poorly written code (point out the defects they were likely assigned when they first joined and how much fun it was). The actual difference between writing code fast and writing it well is usually very small, as coding is usually the shortest phase of the SDLC.

Agile allows for continuous feedback and improvements, which enhances code quality. By prioritizing quality, we reduce bugs and rework, ultimately speeding up long-term development and delivering more reliable software.

In my view, when we all focus towards quality of code, we also need to ensure one more aspect "security". Quality software is not only a well designed, developed code, it should ensure security as well. CheckMarx is one tool security review tool which can be automatically integrated

Use code reviews as a way to ensure the whole team understands the architecture also. Architecture isnt an abstract concept - it is something that gets realised in actual code. We documented our existing architecture and our desired state and used code reviews as a way to drive incremental change towards our goals

Foster a Culture of Quality: Educate your team: Share articles, host workshops, or invite design leaders to speak about the importance of design. Lead by example: Consistently produce high-quality work and demonstrate a commitment to design excellence. Encourage feedback: Create an open environment where everyone feels comfortable providing constructive criticism and design feedback.

Code excellence combines robust design, security, and alignment with client needs. Automated review tools are useful, but manual reviews and a deep understanding of client expectations are crucial. Foster an environment where feedback and learning are encouraged, and remember: complex systems require detailed attention to catch issues that tools might miss.

Code quality check is important, however if the software is Architected well one shouldn't need to write a lot of code or be compelled to write complicated code. If your system is multi-threading, real time or need to develop complicated algorithms, then more code review becomes very critical as even the tools can't really catch the bugs.

One of the key elements of convincing people of the worth of ensuring quality is to make sure you quantify the time (and money) wasted later down the line by not doing it up front. Use automated tools to measure your technical debt and the cycle time increase whenever Devs touch those areas of the codebase. Quantify the likely loss of revenue incurred during an incident that could have been avoided. At all post-incident-reviews, ask "what automated test could have avoided this?" so people can really contrast the cost of writing that test vs the amount lost. This also helps you too by the way. By quantifying the impact, you help ensure against your own uncompromising perfectionism (something we can all be guilty of).

If someone prioritizes speed over quality, they don't understand the concept of the "Cost of poor quality". It's a matter of education and raising awareness about how poor quality can be disastrous and Is never really good for the company.

Creo que el verdadero problema de la deuda técnica es es tener demasiada y generada hace mucho tiempo. En un entorno Agile, no tardaría más de dos sprints en arreglar una deuda técnica generada durante el sprint actual por dos motivos principalmente. El primero, la solución o fix, de esa deuda técnica, está fresca para los desarrolladores. Aún tienen en su cabeza el motivo por el cual dejaron esa deuda y es muy probable que tengan la solución a medio implementar o diseñada, y que no la pudieran aplicar en su momento solo por falta de tiempo. El segundo motivo es que a más cantidad de deuda, mayor coste de solución, con lo que al final es muy probable tener que dedicar al menos sprint para arreglarla con lo que frenaríamos el desarrollo.

Some Technical debt is inevitable; however, a well-designed Architecture can save you from going into debt in the first place. If the debt continues to grow even after a while, it may be wiser to re-architect, the code.

Managing the trade-offs between quick fixes and long-term code quality, ensuring that short-term solutions don't compromise future maintainability and scalability.

In an agile software development team, leveling basic knowledge is crucial. It's essential that all members, regardless of their seniority, understand the fundamental premises and the "why" and "how" behind project practices and decisions. This shared understanding creates a solid foundation, reduces reliance on advanced knowledge, and allows everyone to contribute effectively and cohesively, promoting collaboration and increasing team efficiency.

Explain the S.O.L.I.D principles, and show them how to refactor their code with these principles in mind. Once they are comfortable with S.O.L.I.D you can move on to incorporate the other design principles. Setting project standards that are enforced during routine code reviews can help keep the code base healthy. Pair with a junior dev during code reviews to coach them on how to spot places where code could be refactored to use a pattern, or simplified. Complicated is easy, simple is hard.

Knowledge sharing should not be a general policy of a team of developers. It works well for smaller projects, however for larger projects, or more complex projects, it is not always practical. For large projects it becomes time prohibitive and for complex projects a lot of the team members may not have the background to absorb the materials or the ideas.

Sharing knowledge with team members enhances understanding of best practices, fostering collective expertise and improving overall code quality.

I'd have someone on the team whose primary objective is code quality, gating releases because chaos begets even more insidious arteriosclerosis. Performance proponents will certainly protest, but it's much easier to stop kudzu when it's just a sprout than attempt to reign it in after it has become endemic - less vigilant gardeners end up doing more work. Products, like patients, riddled with disease die younger. If the product's window of opportunity is brief, maybe you don't care so much about longevity, fast (less considered) releases may be the survival strategy - if you're destined to die young, live exhuberantly. Don't decide philosophically or democratically; let pragmatism lead.

In today’s fast-paced tech landscape, continuous learning is not just an option; it’s a necessity. By investing in ongoing education for your team, whether through workshops, courses, or conferences, you equip them with the latest trends, tools, and methodologies in software design. This knowledge doesn't just improve the speed and quality of your development efforts—it sparks innovation. A well-informed team makes decisions that prioritize long-term design excellence over short-term fixes, ensuring sustainable growth and success. In the end, the investment in learning pays dividends, driving both individual and organizational progress.