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?

Organizations must embrace new technologies in their product engineering efforts to stay ahead of the curve. But there is another quality that will be key this decade to giving product teams a proactive advantage: design. Design thinking should be embraced not just by designers, but by everyone involved with a product.

Releasing untested defect fixes into production is a real possibility. Being aware of how this can occur may help reduce the possibility of it happening. Let’s explore the common reasons defect fixes go untested—insufficient testing or resources, and undocumented fixes—as well as the steps we can take to prevent them.