> situations where the bug-count goes up by 30% and sprint velocity goes down by 40% don't just happen out of nowhere. In every situation I've been in where that's happened, management has been warned repeatedly and well in advance that engineering was implementing short term hacks
I've found those result are just as likely to come from a team with low morale. Still a management problem, but if people do not feel valued and don't believe their work matters, they tend to not care about quality. In those cases, improving communication to get to the root cause of problems, re-establishing trust, and making people feel better about their team, role, and work does have an improvement on the velocity and quality of the work.
Ah, but why is the team's morale low? Could it be because the team's feedback is consistently ignored by management? By their deadlines being unreasonable? By the leadership of the team signalling (and, in more than one instance that I've personally witnessed, outright stating) that quality doesn't matter, what we need to do is ship?
Of course that will erode the team's morale. Of course that will reduce the team's velocity in the long run. But it's on management to understand that and realize when a short-term intense burst of effort is necessary to hit an important deadline and update the plan accordingly to include both the short-term burst of effort and the recovery downtime afterwards for the team to relax and for technical debt to be cleaned up.
If management can't (or won't) recognize the basics of planning and pacing, phrasing one's concerns using NVC isn't going to suddenly enlighten them. The way I see it, NVC is just tone-policing dressed up in psychobabble. It becomes yet another excuse for management to dismiss engineers for "not having great culture fit", when the reality is that the expectations from the leaders create the culture and it's those expectations that need to change.
I've found those result are just as likely to come from a team with low morale. Still a management problem, but if people do not feel valued and don't believe their work matters, they tend to not care about quality. In those cases, improving communication to get to the root cause of problems, re-establishing trust, and making people feel better about their team, role, and work does have an improvement on the velocity and quality of the work.