Your quality isn’t immature, it’s uneven.
Why do releases still feel risky despite quality investment? Why are there still issues in production following deployments? Explore how uneven quality practices undermine delivery- and what high-performing teams do differently.
Most organisations don’t struggle with quality because they lack effort, skill, or intent. They struggle because quality maturity is uneven.
Teams invest in automation. They adopt agile testing practices. They introduce dashboards, tools and frameworks to track the quality engineering efforts. On paper, quality should be improving. Yet releases still feel risky. Defects still escape into production. Confidence still drops late in the cycle.
The problem is rarely that teams are “bad at quality”. It’s that they are strong in some areas and weak in others – and that imbalance quietly undermines delivery.
The myth of overall quality maturity
Quality maturity is often treated as a single state: immature or mature, low or high, level two or level four. In reality, quality is not a single capability. It is a system of interconnected practices. When one part of that system evolves faster than the others, the whole system becomes unstable.
We regularly see organisations that are:
- Highly automated, but poorly aligned on what actually needs to be tested
- Strong on reporting, but weak on defect discipline and follow-through
- Agile in delivery, yet still reliant on late-stage testing for confidence
- Experimenting with AI, but lacking the data quality and governance needed to trust its outputs.
- Have engaged testers/QAs, but are missing an overall approach to address quality
Each of these organisations has invested in quality. Each is doing many of the “right” things.
And yet outcomes remain inconsistent. That is the cost of uneven maturity.
What uneven quality looks like in practice
Uneven quality rarely announces itself early. It shows up late — when change is expensive and options are limited.
Common patterns include:
- Test suites growing larger while confidence shrinks
- Test execution taking longer with no improvement in coverage
- Releases blocked by testing, even with CI/CD pipelines in place
- Defects reappearing across releases, despite previous fixes
- Dashboards reporting progress, but not informing decisions
- Teams disagreeing on whether a release is genuinely ready
In isolation, each issue appears manageable. Together, they create a delivery environment that feels unpredictable and fragile. Quality does not fail loudly. It fails late. And it fails expensively.
Why teams become uneven
Uneven quality maturity is not caused by laziness or lack of competence. It is usually the result of how improvement happens over time.
Common drivers include:
- Tool-led improvements introduced without evolving underlying processes
- Local optimisation by individual teams without organisational alignment
- Legacy practices that persist even as delivery models change
- Automation treated as a one-off initiative rather than an evolving capability
- Pressure to move fast without re-examining how quality is owned and governed
Each change is rational in isolation. The risk emerges when improvements are made organically without understanding how they interact, and without a strategic direction.
Why unevenness is more dangerous than low maturity
A genuinely immature quality capability is visible. Risks are understood. Expectations are managed. Uneven maturity is far more dangerous because it creates false confidence.
- Strong automation can mask poor test design.
- Detailed reporting can hide weak defect practices.
- Fast builds can conceal slow feedback, and an increasing technical debt backlog.
Leaders believe risk is under control, until it isn’t. The result is:
- Late surprises
- Increased rework
- Erosion of trust between teams
- Longer lead times
- Higher cost of change
Over time, quality becomes a bottleneck rather than an enabler.
How high-performing teams approach quality differently
High-performing organisations do not chase maturity levels. They focus on balance. They treat quality as a connected system where:
- Strategy guides what matters most
- Test design prioritises risk, not volume
- Execution provides fast, reliable feedback
- Defect practices prevent recurrence, not just release
- Metrics support decisions, not status updates
- Automation and AI amplify what already works, rather than compensating for gaps
Instead of only asking, “How mature are we?” They ask, “Where are we uneven and what is that costing us?”
The path forward: understanding before improving
Improving quality does not require major uplift. It requires clarity. Until organisations understand which capabilities are holding others back, investment will continue to produce mixed results.
The most effective teams:
- Assess quality across all critical domains, not in isolation
- Identify the weakest constraints, not the loudest symptoms
- Prioritise changes that improve flow, confidence and predictability
- Improve incrementally, with intent
Only then does maturity become meaningful and sustainable.
Start by finding the imbalance
The question facing most organisations is not whether they care about quality.
It is whether they understand where their quality is uneven, and how that unevenness is shaping delivery outcomes.
Our online quality assessment and complimentary consultation is designed to reveal exactly that highlighting strengths, exposing gaps, and helping teams focus improvement where it will have the greatest impact.
Because improving quality isn’t about doing more.
It’s about bringing the whole system into balance.
