Customer Reviews

Corrective Action for the Software Industry

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Corrective Action for the Software Industry is the latest in Denise Robitaille's series of short, simple, and straightforward how-to-manage-quality books. This is the first of the books that focuses on applying quality practices to a specific industry; and accordingly Denise is joined by her first co-author, Johanna Rothman, who is prominent in the software industry.

About two-thirds of software effort is spent on maintenance, mainly correcting products after they've been implemented. Ironically, although the software industry frequently indulges in [equally frequently disappointing] costly new large-scale initiatives and tools aimed at home-run performance improvements, the industry seldom devotes much effort to correcting the actual causes of the specific product problem symptoms it keeps fixing.

The great strength of this book is that it alerts software folks to the need to go beyond mere remediation fixes of the immediate problem and also take corrective actions to prevent the same type of problem from occurring again. Both the product itself and the processes producing it are candidates for corrective action.

The book describes seven corrective action steps, including not only verifying the implementation but also verifying the action's effectiveness (which too often is neglected). I fear many in software may resist the book's emphasis on formal procedures and documentation, although the approach is proven and widely accepted in other industries.

I like the way this book maps what has primarily been a manufacturing focused approach to corrective action, to software projects. It has been something that has popped up more than once in my career. The, "why can't you just implement X like the Quality Team on the 2nd floor" question. I have never been able to completely answer why I found it hard to map the hardware team's quality process to software. This book has filled in the missing pieces. The difference between short term fixes vs finding and correcting the root cause of an issue that can be avoided in the future is a goal we can strive for in our software development. At a minimum this approach brings the team to a collaberative education of weaknesses in the process that can be identified. This book presents a straighforward, common sense approach, with good examples. This can be a good reference book for Issue Definition and Root Cause analysis.