I saw a cooking show the other day where the chef was asked his secret for great food. His reply was essentially start with great ingredients and don’t screw them up.
That got me thinking about our software quality and my experiences in the workplace. It seems like a lot of time and effort are spent on managing to our exit criteria. We spend hours negotiating exit criteria, tracking progress of pass-rates, writing waivers, etc.
Thinking instead like the chef, our time may be better spent on the inputs to our processes instead. At least we should focus on the inputs as much as the outputs and current status. At our lessons learned, after the project is over, we do point to inputs (poor requirements, poor code delivered to system test, etc.).
Some ideas to concentrate on inputs:
Requirements
Typical Exit criteria
- Requirements document written in proper template
- Reviewed and signed off by development, test, quality, etc.
Better to put more emphasis on activities that improve requirements
- Actually talking with customers
- Test our requirements with prototypes, models, etc
- Anticipate change in requirements (build a prioritized backlog and develop in iterations)
Design & Coding
Typical Exit Criteria
- Have the reviews been conducted?
- Do the developers tell us they executed unit tests?
Better to put more emphasis on activities that help make code better
- Using design patterns
- Reusing code
- Are design and code reviews effective? How can we add value to the reviews?
- Pair programming, Test Driven Development
Test
Typical Exit Criteria
- Test coverage
- Pass rate
- Quantity and severity of defects
Better to put more emphasis on activities that help find more and better defects
- Customer feedback
- Negative mode testing (fault injection)
- Exploratory testing
- Building the knowledge of our testers, in technology and domain knowledge
These lists seem obvious, but in the heat of projects, especially with schedule pressure, the temptation is to jettison any activity that doesn’t seem to contribute the exit criteria.