Defect Prevention in Software Engineering

Software quality is one of the most important and essential factors from last few years. This is due to forces from several different sectors of computer industry. Companies and organization face many different problems that has increased difficulty in obtaining and achieving rapid and successful development of software systems. The main challenge in any software product development is simply to reduce and minimize and number and occurrence of defects.

Defects are one of the major causes of decrease in software quality and increase in overall cost due to additional cost required for resolving defects. Therefore, identifying and resolving defects is main focus of any development team that will help in preventing software products from occurring again.

For this identification and resolution of defect, defect prevention is most important and essential activity of software development life cycle that directly effect on controlling the cost and quality of software product. Someone has well said that “Prevention is better than cure”. The main goal of defect prevention is to identify defects and take corrective measures to minimize their impact and completely reduce chances of their re-occurrence in future releases.

Basic Principle of DP :

• Programmers need to evaluate i.e. check their own errors.
• There should be use of feedback as a part of process.
• Improvement of process should be included as an integral part of software process.
• Take some time to understand improvement in process.
• Casual analysis should also be a part of process.

Objective of Defect Prevention (DP) :
There are several objectives of DP as given below :

• Main objective of defect prevention is to identify defects and then analyze their impact on system. This is simply done so that re-occurrence of defects can be minimized.
• To reduce and minimize total number of defects to increase software quality.
• To ensure that defects do not occur again by suggesting some prevention techniques.
• To increase overall productivity.
• To reduce work effort required to fix defects by not allowing defects to occur.
• To set some goals for simply improving critical processes with team-level accountability.
• To reduce cost of fixing defects by taking some measures that will prevent defect being introduced in system.
• To establish some practice within projects for identification of defects as early as possible in process.
• Testers and developers should work together and collaborate for taking correct and quick decisions regarding defects and minimize the risk.

Organization Policy :
According to some organization policy,

• Defect Prevention (DP) Board are responsible to manage and handle activities of defect prevention at organizational level.
• Project Manager appoint DP Coordinator to manage and handle activities of defect prevention at project level.
• Long-term plan or goal is also established and developed for activities of defect prevention by DP Board.
• Senior Management generally review result of activities of DP to simply check their effectiveness.