Best Practices: The Practical Guide to Defect Prevention

Here’s a quick reminder about one of the books in our Best Practices series for developers: The Practical Guide to Defect Prevention (ISBN 9780735622531; 480 pages), by Marc McDonald, Robert Musson, and Ross Smith.

This practical, hands-on guide captures, categorizes, and builds a process of best practices to help avoid creating defects during the development process—rather than fixing them after extensive analysis. Although there are various proprietary and competing standards for reducing software defects, these methods suffer from issues involving timeliness, effectiveness, and cost. What’s more, many other books focus on fixing errors after they’ve been introduced or promote idealized academic theories. 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 hard-won lessons into a single, workable lifecycle process that will help deliver better-quality software.

You can download the book’s Table of Contents and Chapter 2, “Defect Prevention Frameworks,” here.

And here’s a guest post on our blog by author Ross Smith: “Portfolio selection and game theory in defect prevention”

Enjoy.