Quality can emerge individually through synthesis, discovery and validation: individuals can develop their own quality standards through personal experience, spot problems against self defined standards, validate and refine their standards over time. This takes intentional iterations.

How does collaboration benefit quality? It is through an iterative collaborative process, where there is synthesis and then there is a discovery and then back to synthesis so on.

Collaboration develops shared standards by synthesizing different perspectives on what quality looks like. Originally, the developer did not start with clear standards. During reviews, different preferences towards code reveal themselves, like descriptive variable names or inline comments and so on. Over time, these preferences synthesize into team conventions, not because any individual preference was “correct,” rather there is a negotiation and a shared agreement. Once this gets validated, then it is shared across an organization or a community.