The temporal evolution of in situ second-harmonic generation was employed to study domain dynamics during periodic poling in Rb-doped KTP. With this method we investigated the influence of various poling parameters, including electric-field pulse shape, pulse magnitude, and number of pulses, on the quality of the QPM structure. It was found that the grating formation can be a sub-millisecond process and the benefits of using symmetric triangular electric-field pulse shape over square pulse shape in the single-pulse poling regime were demonstrated. Multiple-pulse poling with triangular pulses was shown to have a detrimental effect on the QPM structure quality, while multiple square pulses can provide additional flexibility to the structuring process.