Thought leaders from the software community are taking over the TechWell Hub to answer questions and engage in conversations. Writer, speaker, and author Mary Poppendieck hosted this Slack takeover and discussed all things agile, including how development has evolved over the decades and how to implement agile changes.

While using index cards and a wall can function just fine as a kanban or Scrum board, issue-tracking tools such as Jira can make it easier to manage a backlog, especially with a distributed team. But these tools are more complex to use and can add their own overhead to the process. You need to keep things simple.

Ensuring that quality is advocated for at every step along the lifecycle can be tough. One easy response is, “Quality is everyone’s job”—after all, whole-team accountability is a key tenet of agile. But what does this really mean in practice? What approaches and roles help us embrace a culture of quality engineering?