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 sectors of computer industry. Companies and organization face many problems that have 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 significant 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 Principles of Defect Prevention

• Early Defect Detection and Resolution: It finds and fixes errors as early when possible in the process of development. Early issue detection lowers the cost and effort needed to remedy problems.
• Enhancement of Process: It employs best practices, industry standards and lessons acquired from previous projects to continuously improve development processes and raise overall quality.
• Code Evaluations: To find and fix errors, conduct routine code reviews. It encourages team members to work together and share expertise.
• Measurements and Metrics: It creates metrics to assess the success of efforts to prevent defects. Key performance indicators should be tracked and examined to find areas that need improvement.
• Loops of Feedback: Create feedback loops to gather knowledge from different development phases. It utilizes input to modify procedures and stop reoccurring problems.

Objective of Defect Prevention (DP)

There are several objectives of DP as given below :

• Identifying defects: 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.
• Reducing Defects: To reduce and minimize total number of defects to increase software quality.
• Increasing Productivity: To ensure that defects do not occur again by suggesting some prevention techniques and to increase overall productivity.
• Reducing Work: To reduce work effort required to fix defects by not allowing defects to occur.
• Improving Processes: To set some goals for simply improving critical processes with team-level accountability.
• Cost Reduction: To reduce cost of fixing defects by taking some measures that will prevent defect from being introduced in system.
• Collaboration: 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.

Conclusion

The goal of defect prevention is to create a culture of quality throughout the software development lifecycle, not just to find and solve problems. It is becoming more and more important as technology develops, as it guarantees that software meets or beyond user expectations while reducing the need for post-release problem repairs.