Agile Quality Tip #4 - Use Defect Detection for Defect Prevention
Posted on Thu, Feb 24, 2011
As we wrote previously, our current series of posts is covering 10 brief quality tips designed to help you extend well-known agile quality practices to ensure that your software satisfies business needs—effectively and efficiently.
Tip #4 is "Continuously Evolve Your Quality Policy in Response to Defects Detected."
When your developer testing or QA testing efforts expose defects that made it past your team's quality policy, don’t just fix that one defect and move on.
This is like an automobile manufacturer noticing that a car came off the assembly line with a faulty brake installation, fixing that one car's brakes, and hoping that the problem doesn't happen again. A safer approach—one that would save a lot of time, hassle, and grief in the long run—would be to examine the assembly line, determine how that problem got introduced, then fix its root cause.
In terms of the software development process, this approach involves working with development and QA to:
- Isolate the root cause of this general type of defect.
- Determine how to modify the development process to prevent it.
- Determine how to measure if that the modification is actually being practiced.
In many cases, a coding policy change will do the trick: by enabling or reconfiguring certain static analysis rules, you can find all other instances of existing code that is prone to the same type of defect—and you can also ensure that new or modified code steers clear of the known pitfall. Often, runtime error detection and data flow static analysis tools even point you to the precise static analysis rules that you can follow to prevent the specific defects they expose.
Other times, the resolution might involve changing the way that code is tested, or adding to a list of items to review during manual code inspections.
Ultimately, this immunizes your software development process against many of your most common software defects.
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