The speed / quality trade-off fallacy gets many teams stuck in downward spiral feedback loops - sacrificing quality for speed, both are lost.

Teams find their backlogs filled with bugs, their stakeholders frustrated by missed deadlines and the teams themselves unhappy and stressed.

Systems thinking, and in particular using causal loop diagrams to identify the feedback loops at play can shed light on how and why the fallacy is so tempting yet so destructive.

In this talk I'll demonstrate the building of a range of causal feedback loops to visualise the underlying causes of the problems. With such visualisations we can advocate for the practices of technical excellence that counter the pressures of the fallacy, such as collaborative modelling with domain-driven design, test driven development & living documentation.