Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Free e-book (until May 27th) - Defect Prevention

A colleague of mine told me about this book. It is a free download (though requires a signup to Microsoft's training site). Here is an overview and link.


Body:
The Practical Guide to Defect Prevention
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.
Part I Introduction to Defect Prevention
1 Defect Prevention
2 Defect Prevention Frameworks
3 The Economics of Defect Prevention
Part II Defect Detection Techniques
4 Quality and the Development Process
5 Using Productivity Games to Prevent Defects
6 Improving the Testability of Software
Part III Defect Analysis Techniques
7 Software Measurement and Metrics
8 Risk Analysis
9 Using Simulation and Modeling for Organizational Innovation
10 Defect Taxonomies
11 Root Cause Analysis
Part IV Defect Prevention Techniques
12 Adopting Processes
13 FMEA, FTA, and Failure Modeling
14 Prevention Tab.
Part V A Culture of Prevention
15 Scenario Voting
16 Creating a Quality Culture
17 Moving Quality Upstream
18 Rewards, Motivation, and Incentives
19 Knowledge Management and Communication
20 Pulling It All Together

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Meeting Announcement - May 28th

NEWS
- We've moved our meeting to the 4th Thursday this month. (It may be permanent)


Time and Location

The Red Earth QA's meeting will be held on the 3rd floor of 100 N. Broadway from 11:30am-1pm on Thursday, May 28th. Look for the signs to direct you to the correct room.

Topic

Michael Penny from Tek Systems will provide some insight into the local job market.

We have some unconfirmed additions as well. So come and be surprised!

Directions

  • You can park in Main Street Parking on Main or you can find street parking.
  • From I-40, take the Robinson Exit. Go North on Robinson to Main. Right on Main. You can either go to Main Street Parking or continue to Santa Fe Parking. You will see 100 N Broadway on your left across Broadway. The building says 'Chase' at the top.

Monday, May 18, 2009

Creating User Interfaces - Design Patterns

Do your users complain about your application, even though it gets the job done?
Are you asked to 'spice it up' or make it 'Web 2.0-ish'?

Well Design Patterns are for you! Here are some helpful links (though you can find your own easily) to inspire design of User Interfaces.
 
 
For example, UI-Patterns.com lists these patterns among many.
 

Inline Input Adder
Minimize the amount of input fields by allowing the user to add more input fields if he needs them.
 
Undo
Give the user an option to easily undo an action.
 
Edit-In-Place
Use a dynamic text editor to allow the user to edit text
directly “in-place”.
 
Primary & Secondary Actions
Match the visual presentation of actions to their importance to get users through a form as quickly as possible.
 
Inline Suggestions
Help the users to give an answer by suggesting valid answers from which to pick from.
 
Carousel
Show thumbnail images of items on a scrolling menu, which allows users to browse through them.
 

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Starting With Root Cause Analysis (and mitigation)

Root cause analysis doesn't have its roots in Software. It was originaly applied to manufacturing processes and has been adapted to Software defects. 

One approach is to list known causes (defect in requirements, defect in design, defect in coding, defect in testing, defect in environment, etc.) and associate each defect with that cause. That is not what I'll be doing here.

I'll be discussing going through a thought experiment for some subset of failures to determine what is likely a series of root causes and how to manage that long-term to make your product better by learning from your team's mistakes. 

First, it's likely that you only have the bandwidth to do this for a relatively few items and it's important to pick those items well. One excellent candidate is user-reported bugs that are deemed 'critical' (Hopefully, you have some reasonable way to do this). In all cases, it's helpful for the bug being analyzed to be fixed and be verified as fixed. 

Then for each defect, record the following: (This is my list, and can be suited to your needs)
  • ID  / title - This comes from your bug tracking system and is used to clearly identify what issue is being discussed
  • Function -  This is the actual system capability that failed and it may be part of a formal list of system capabilities or may be some general statement such as 'Detailed Data Display'
  • Effect -  This is the impact to the user or some discoverable impact to the system.  It may or may not be the same as your title, depending on your defect report standards. A good example would be 'User unable to log in after changing to a long password'
  • Failure -  This is a description of the behavior or design where what was implemented differs from the expectations. It may or may not be the same as your title, depending on your defect report standards. Often, it is more detailed than the Effect and may require some code or environment analysis to clarify.  A good example of this is 'Users are able to create new passwords that are more than 45 characters long, but any password longer than that will not be validated successfully'
  • Notes - This is you can discuss any historical / contextual information that doesn't fit elsewhere, but that would be helpful if reviewed in the future. An example could be "This appears to be an issue that has existed since the product's first release, before we did formalized testing"
  • Cause(s) -  This is where you apply one of several techniques. Rather than go into them here, you can read about Ishikawa Diagrams and make a Pareto Chart to fill out the next steps. There are other related topics you can apply to fill out this section if you find they suit your needs better.
  • Recommended Actions - If you created a Pareto chart, you have the highest contributors to the cause at the top of your list of causes. You work your way down the list to address items insofar as they are helpful. It's likely that some of the causes will need to be left as continued exposure to risk if the cost to implement is not acceptable.
  • Responsibility - Not only do you identify actions, but you need to assign them to someone. If you have other methods of assigning work, you can simply refer to that here. For now, we'll assume that this spreadsheet is used to track these items.
  • Target Completion Date - The person that is responsible for completing this action should come up with some acceptable date to complete this. Record that date here.
  • Action Taken - In the end, it's possible that the action isn't exactly what was targeted. If different, record here.
  • Date Action Taken - Record the date that the action was completed so that you can focus only on the items that are not completed.
There is an implied workflow here. On some schedule, you will need to update this list (unless you are doing this as a one-time exercise). Once you have assigned actions, you will need to follow up with people to ensure they are complete or that if any changes need to be made, that those changes are made and that the mitigation is complete.

In addition to online resources regarding root cause analysis, you can also look for classroom training.

Friday, May 01, 2009

Fun Bugs

Have you ever found a bug that you had to say "Hey! Lookit!"? Most of the ones like this I find are only of interest to my team. However, here is a link to bugs found (and fixed) along with a discussion of each.