The Practical Guide to Defect Prevention (Paperback)

This is a practical, hands-on guide to reducing defect introduction during the software development process. Written by the experts, the book highlights industry-leading techniques and methods that can be used by any development team. Numerous techniques for reducing software defects have been examined and used at Microsoft Corporation and other software development organizations. Many of those techniques are the focus of books and professional organizations that publicize various proprietary and competing tools and standards. However, all of those methods suffer from issues surrounding timeliness, effectiveness, or cost. What's more, most other books concentrate on fixing errors after they have been introduced into code. This practical, hands-on guide captures, categorizes, and builds a process of best practices to avoid creating defects during the development process, rather than fixing them after extensive analysis. Not an idealized academic book, this guide presents practical methods for reducing defect introduction through prevention and immediate detection and by moving the detection of defects closer to their introduction. Written by experts with over a century of software development experience among them, this book distills many hard-won lessons into a single, workable lifecycle process that will help deliver better quality software. Producing high-quality products is the goal for most companies. Defect prevention is prevalent in most industries, whether it is cooking-oil temperature for McDonald's fries or fitting the doors on a Lexus. Most products and services carry warranties and provide the customer assurances that the products will meet their expectation. Softwarepackages do not guarantee they will perform as the buyer expects, nor do they even ensure against catastrophic damage to other software. As software gets more complex and the software ecosystem more interdependent, there is ever-increasing pressure to improve reliability and quality. Fixing bugs as customers find them is expensive--both in terms of development and testing costs as well as in customer trust. Preventing defects and mining the collective wisdom of our development community is the goal of the Microsoft Windows Defect Prevention team.