The Practical Guide to Defect Prevention (Best Practices (Microsoft)) [Paperback]

Marc McDonald (Author), Robert Musson (Author), Ross Smith (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0735622531 | ISBN-13: 978-0735622531 | Publication Date: March 7, 2007 | Edition: 1

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. While 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, 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 distills hard-won lessons into a single, workable lifecycle process that will help deliver better-quality software. Visit the Defect Prevention Web site at http://www.defectprevention.org

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Key Book Benefits:

- Distills best development practices upstream in the coding cycle by offering techniques and methods to eliminate bad code before a bug is released - Provides a full collection of tools and forms to enable immediate use of the techniques described - Features coverage of and integration with allied methodologies for organizations that use Six Sigma, Agile, Burton, and other similar quality tools

About the Author

All authors are Microsoft employees on the Defect Prevention team.

Harry Emil has worked at Microsoft for 15 years as a product support specialist, tester, and developer. He ran a hardware compatibility lab and has worked on the development of numerous intranet and Internet Web properties.

Lori Ada Kilty has spent 16 years in the computer industry and 20 years in the Air Force and the National Guard. She is a Six Sigma black belt and has worked as a program manager, developer, and test manager.

Marc McDonald’s career spans the entire 30-year personal computer industry from its infancy with the MITS Altair to today. He was Microsoft’s first salaried employee, and he designed the FAT file system for MS-DOS®. He holds five software patents. He has worked as a principal research scientist and developer for a number of companies in between stints at Microsoft.

Robert Musson has more than 25 years of software experience as a development engineer and in various management positions. He spent 15 years at Teradyne, helping bring to market a variety of products for the telecommunications industry. While there, he helped deploy the Team Software ProcessSM (TSPSM) to the first industry site. He was vice president of business strategy at a small start-up before becoming a member of the TSP Initiative at the Software Engineering Institute.

Ross Smith has been in the software industry for almost 20 years, developing and testing software on mainframe systems, handheld devices, Windows, and Microsoft Office. He holds five software patents.

Product Details

• Paperback: 480 pages
• Publisher: Microsoft Press; 1 edition (March 7, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0735622531
• ISBN-13: 978-0735622531
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #413,176 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very useful reference, April 20, 2008

By 

William B. Bielby "bix lives" (Marquette, MI United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Practical Guide to Defect Prevention (Best Practices (Microsoft)) (Paperback)

"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 naïve 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!

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Buy this book... do it today, March 6, 2008

By 

Arnold Marquez "individual me" (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Practical Guide to Defect Prevention (Best Practices (Microsoft)) (Paperback)

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)

5.0 out of 5 stars It is practical in most sections, and correctly focuses on overall reliablity, February 8, 2010

By 

Ken Fulmer "Ken" (King of Prussia, PA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Practical Guide to Defect Prevention (Best Practices (Microsoft)) (Paperback)

I had a chance to read this book thanks to lots of snow here in the Mid-Atlantic region. It is easy to read, with good examples. There were some very useful graphics and charts throughout the book. Chapter 3 on economics was good, but could have been better, and I wish there were more case studies to relate to improvements in process. Overall though it is a very balanced apporach to quality software and defect prevention. So many other publications tend to over stress back end testing, and automated testing tools. I do wish there were a bit more on practical guides to developing testing strategies in differnet SDLC methods, and in balancing requirements and test scripting. The chapter on a quality culture is not very practical and seems not to tie back to the economics chapter as well as I would have hoped. Overall though I thought this was a very useful book and well worth the purchase price.