Defect Prevention Technique

I reiterate that  “Prevention is better than cure” This statement is hold true for Software development as well. Cost of preventing the defects is always lesser than reworking on the defects. DPP (Defect Prevention Plan) also lead us to achieve our goal of meeting the objective of Quality for the project. Project should have some processes in place to identify and fix the defects in the early stages of the project as I have already discussed in my post on Project Quality Management.

 

Defect Prevention Representative (DPR):

 

Project Management should  define, plan and discuss the goal of Defects Prevention technique  with team members. A role of Defect Prevention Representative (DPR)  play a major rule in Defect Prevention Activities. A senior team member should be assigned DPR role. DPR has responsibilities of sharing coding standards, guidelines, defects and best coding practices with the project team. DPR collect all the defects, analyze and make a report on causes and prevention of the defects. Ideally, he should make some histogram like Depareto Chart and give presentation to the team on the analysis of the defects and how team can prevent these defects in the future.

 

Coding Standards and Guidelines:

 

Project Management should identify and plan Coding standards, guideline for the project which Project team needs to follow throughout the project life cycle. Coding standards help the developer to keep the code simple, structured , easier to read and  modular. It also take less time to fix the defects in structured,  readable and modular code than unstructured and unreadable code.

 

Reviews :

 

Reviewing the code and other deliverables is the best way to nip the defects in the bud. Project Management should plan and discuss the type of reviews project team need to follow like Self Review, Peer Review and Peer to Peer reviews ( explained in PQM post).

 

Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis:

 

Nothing comes free. Defect Prevention technique is also cost us some resource time and efforts. It is very imperative to monitor the DP activities and their effectiveness. For example, if Project team find less defects in Review and more defects in QA testing. Then it indicates that our review strategies are not working but it is still costing  the project dearly. It could be laziness of resource issue or not enough time for review activity and action plan needs to be in place to tackle this issue. DPR role come into the picture here and he ensure that all the team members follow defect prevention activities religiously. Creating a Quality Metrics is a best way to do quantitative analysis for the DP activities. It helps us to determine that how effective DP activities are for the project. If DP activities are not effective, it means we are just wasting our time and efforts on this activities. Basically, quality metrics uses many formula to calculate effectiveness of review, cost of the Quality and cost of appraisal and failure cost.