Repeatedly in my career, lack of attention to detail has lead to quality problems. As a result attention to details is one of the behaviors I pay a lot of attention to in developers.

As with most things there is a spectrum, and some trade offs. One team I worked with had a wide spread of people on the spectrum of attention to detail. On one end was a developer who turned out lots of code, with little attention to detail. This developer had a 30% re-open rate for bugs / tickets (the highest rate on the team). I was always able to find a bunch of bugs in this person’s work whenever something was delivered. At the other end, their was a developer who turned out far less features, but was so careful that the re-open rate was 5%. It was always a struggle to find issues in this person’s work. Their is definitely a sweet spot between the two in terms of feature delivery in a timely manner, versus sufficient quality. That sweet spot is at different places depending on the context and goals of a project.

Repeated themes

A number of common themes come up with details being missed. Some of the often found repeated themes are:

  • Not addressing key user interaction in specifications
  • Not getting clarification on ambiguous detail in a specification
  • Skipping over key sentences in specifications or requirements
  • Only paying attention to the “happy path” through a use case
  • Missing changes required in related functionality
  • Skipping quality process steps - testing your own work, automated static code analysis, or code reviews

Key Points

  • Mistakes are commonly made in the details
  • The difference in good and great is often in the details

Resources