Pressure and Quality

When I feel too much pressure, it affects quality. If youll look for them in the chapters about optimizing Undo, youll see places where I saw that the code or the tests needed improving, but I didnt do it. In earlier chapters, faced with the same sort of issues, I more often improved them.

Letting pressure keep us from writing better tests or clear code is short- sighted. It doesnt just affect us laterit probably slows us down right away. We wouldnt have noticed these problems had they not been impacting us now. Still, as much as I try, I cant always keep my eye on quality when Im feeling pressure. It always slows me down to back off on the quality, yet I continue to do it.

I have no magic solution to offer for this, just the observation that pressure hurts the project. Think about it, try to work around the effects of pressure, and use the Release Plan list. If you have additional practices that help, please drop me an e-mail.