---
title: "On time, with quality - why is this mostly failing?"
url: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/on-time-with-quality-why-is-this-mostly-failing.md"
canonical: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/on-time-with-quality-why-is-this-mostly-failing.html"
published: "2012-05-06T11:50:23+00:00"
updated: "2013-02-24T21:13:36.343000+00:00"
tags: ["First Steps during chaos", "Meta"]
author: "Roy Osherove"
description: "Everyone in the software industry seems to be talking about the quality mantra lately. Agile, XP and kanban brought this issue to full front, but I see many team leads failing with the quality part. Many of us keep chasing quality and…"
usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)."
license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
---

# On time, with quality - why is this mostly failing?

Everyone in the software industry seems to be talking about the quality mantra lately. Agile, XP and kanban brought this issue to full front, but I see many team leads failing with the quality part.

Many of us keep chasing quality and never achieving it, because we don't know how to make time. We don't have any time to learn/teach the team and practice true quality code (unit testing, tdd, acceptance and automation to start with) because [we're in chaos and we are addicted to it.](https://www.5whys.com/articles/the-chaos-addiction.html)

Our lack of time makes our decision to focus on "getting things out the door" more frequent, and so we have more quality issues and even less time, because we just have more and more fires to put out.

To break this pattern, true leadership from us, the team leaders at the bottom, is needed. It's about taking a risk and breaking the cycle. It's about making time to learn.

Want to ship on time with quality? remove some of the commitments you have, make time to learn, practices, and build quality into the code you're writing. You can't get better at what you do if you don't have time to get better. and You don't have time because you keep chasing your tails.

So you have to break away and make time by removing some existing commitments. That's scary, but it's your job, remember? [Here's your manifesto again](https://www.5whys.com/articles/team-leader-manifesto-take-3.html).


---

## About the author

**Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery.

### Sites

- [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership.
- [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts.
- [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin.
- [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model.
- [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps.
- [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes).

### Social

- X: https://x.com/royosherove
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/

### Contact

- Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7

### License

Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/