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. While there are various proprietary and competing standards for reducing software defects, these methods suffer from issues surrounding timeliness, effectiveness, or cost. What's more, many other books focus on fixing errors after they've been introduced. This guide, however, 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 is not an idealized academic book. Instead, it distills many hard-won lessons into a single, workable lifecycle process that will help deliver better quality software.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 2 Ratings

Buy this book... do it today - 2008-03-06
Reviewer Rating:
This is the first review I have performed and here it goes... I work in software development and have for the last 11 years. As a Quality Assurance Professional, I think "The Practical Guide to Defect Prevention" should be on everyone's book shelf. Everyone in the industry or those contemplating a start-up in the industry should read this book to get an understanding of what quality means and how to achieve it. This is a fun book filled with real world experiences and enough technical knowledge to implement the many quality systems and is most beneficial read from end to end, but is also designed to be a reference. "The Practical Guide to Defect Prevention" does a great job of giving a strong foundation for those wanting to develop quality in their processes.
Who can really benefit from this book?
* The executive wanting to know what it takes to have a successful software business
* The manager wanting to know how to improve the product
* The product designer who wants to provide enhancements to existing features and determine what features to add
* The developer wanting to gauge the effectiveness of the implementation
* The tester that wants to catch all of the errors
Sure, we could talk about all the content and implementation issues, including; Root Cause Analysis, Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA), Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) or Failure Modeling, but my favorite aspect of this book is the real world examples and pitfalls described.
Many great related quotes are included to illustrate some aspect of the material to be presented. My favorite was in chapter 12, "Adapting Processes" where there was a quote from Mark Twain "A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way". This quote illustrates the reason you need to read this book and keep it on your bookshelf.
Arne
The Practical Guide to Defect Prevention (Best Practices)

Very useful reference - 2008-04-20
Reviewer Rating:
"The Practical Guide to Defect Prevention" was written for software developers and testers, but many techniques presented can be applied to improve quality in other products as well. I'm in the midst of a career change into software development after 2 decades of working with office automation hardware, and have referred to this book during a current project, as well as passed along suggestions straight from this book to former colleagues in a much different career field. When I saw the title of this book, I was afraid I'd be reading advice that wasn't much more than common sense, or a rehash of material learned in programming or intro software testing. Wrong! Realizing how naGǦve I was, I picked up 2 other texts in the field of defect prevention and root cause analysis. I found this book to be more readable. The clear taxonomy, the complete explanations of various methods (with multiple examples and references) and the humor (!) held my interest enough to where I learned and understood the techniques presented, as well as broadened my understanding of what quality software development really entails.

As a previous reviewer pointed out, this book is useful to everyone from the tester who wants to catch errors, through the executive wanting a successful business. And, I suppose this sounds like I'm laying it on with a trowel, but I have to say it: Although I'm a voracious reader, I keep only a few dozen books on my shelves at home; this is one of them, and I suspect that I'll continue referring to it for quite some time. Thanks to the authors Ross, Marc, Bob, Dan, David, Lori, and Josh for taking the time and putting forth such a great effort!

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