The Practical Guide to Defect Prevention

Making High-Quality Software the Goal

To have a goal of high quality, you first need to understand what high-quality software means. Traditionally, high quality has meant a lack of defects found during inspection and testing. Unfortunately, as pointed out in Chapter 4, “Quality and Product Development,” testing can only indicate a lack of quality and it is not possible to test software completely. Consequently, the number of defects found in test cannot be the only metric used to assess software quality. In many cases, quality is in the eye of the beholder, so you also need to evaluate subjective quality based on customer perceptions and expectations. (See Chapter 15, “Scenario Voting.”) In terms of perceived quality, software defects caused ...