What is a defect?
So many people debate a topic without first agreeing on the scope or meaning of the topic. As a management consultant, I believe that my role is to ask the “stupid question”.
So here is my stupid question to consider … What is a defect? I am not looking for answers but simply highlighting the fact that within any given organization there are differences of opinion about the nature of defects. In many cases the discussion of defects is defensive as people or organizations look to avoid responsibility for defects by denying their existence or deflecting blame to another group.
This is the human side of defect management which is difficult to address with scientific methods. Successful defects management must define a defect and use scientific methods to define and measure defects. If the information is used to punish individuals or groups, they will manipulate the measurement process and confuse the results.
I remembered exactly a true story in one of my projects. The organization decided one day that they will measure the team by the defects opened. The development team was told that their performance evaluation will be based on the first time defect detected for every work they brought about. The QA team was told that they will be measured by the number of defects they found. I guess you just figured out the human resource problem this scenario created.
Everyone now is defensive and every functional group would like to take care of their own skin and loses sight of the goal of the project and has now introduced more work time into the project to make sure everything is perfect. I had to convince the project team assigned to me to think differently and more collaboratively based on the goal of the project rather than this new metric brought about. It is tough for the team to buy-in into the idea as I suggested. In the end, when the team worked on the project goals we set, we ended with only three true defects after we move the project from development to testing phase and when we went live. Only two because a few components were missed in the cut-over process.
Randy, excellent example of the problem I was describing. If there are different opinions of what constitutes a defect, there will be conflicting solutions. The same problem exists with Requirements Management. There are so many different opinions about the definition of a requirement which cause similar problems and confusion.
Nick.. Funny you mentioned requirements management. I have always seen that the root cause of project problems/defects is the requirements part of a project. Many will disagree but my standard statement is this. If a BA means one way on a requirement and a developer understood it another way, then again the QA understood another one more other way, then you already have a defect without work starting.
If we are not able to successfully set a single understanding of what the customer really is needed from the three functional groups I mentioned, we will always have issues/defects/problems that usually contributes to a longer time of getting the work done.
A defect is something that diminishes perfection and perfection is something we aspire to acheive. However, pragmatically speaking, we can never acheive 100% perfection so we should not be too concerned about defects provided they are suitably managed.The defect measurement process mentioned by Randy is akin to apportioning blame and discouraged collaboration, the irony is that the measurement process is itself a ‘defect’.
I agree that perfection is unachievable but we should be aware of how far we have deviated from perfection. “we should not be too concerned about defects provided they are suitably managed” is a curious statement. Managing defects implies tracking and resolving defects once they are found. The more effective approach is to prevent defects (recognizing that all of them cannot be prevented). This brings us back to the need to define what we mean by a defect.
In order to prevent defects we need to understand the source of defects. Identifying the source of defects is not the same as assigning blame and I agree we should not focus on assigning blame.