A team of developers once skipped a round of tests to hit a feature deadline.
When asked why they cut corners, they didn’t mumble excuses. They simply said, “We thought speed was more important.”
That belief didn’t come from the backlog. It didn’t come from JIRA.
It came from leadership.
Not because leadership said, “Skip the tests.” But because leadership didn’t say anything at all.
Silence is a signal. And in high-pressure environments, silence is interpreted as permission.
This is how culture works: it quietly instructs behavior when no one’s looking.
You can write all the processes you want, print all the test coverage charts, and run audits until your dev teams go cross-eyed. But when a release is at risk and time is tight, your team will choose whatever they believe leadership values most.
And if quality isn’t one of those values?
It gets eaten alive.
We see this over and over in scaling tech companies:
- High-performing teams start cutting corners to keep pace.
- Test coverage drops.
- Incidents spike.
- Devs burn out.
Leadership reacts with more process. More rules. More compliance steps.
But process without belief is just theater.
You can’t audit your way out of a cultural issue. Because quality is a leadership behavior, not just an engineering task.
If you want quality to survive under pressure, you have to intentionally shape the culture.
How?
By creating feedback loops. By making quality visible. By rewarding it in moments that matter.
Here’s one deceptively simple tool:
Once a month, ask your teams: What quality behaviors did you see being rewarded? What behaviors got ignored — or even punished?
That’s it.
No fancy dashboards. No 30-slide decks. Just direct, human truth about what your culture is actually teaching.
Then act on it.
Call out the moments where quality showed up — even when it slowed things down. Tell the stories. Share them publicly. Make it known that quality isn’t a luxury, it’s a leadership principle.
Because if you don’t define the culture, the deadline will.
And that deadline doesn’t care about your test coverage.