The Defect Management Process

Experts believe that a focused software development process and testing will allow releasing less buggy software applications in the market. Preventing defects is much more effective in reducing the number of defects and a cost-effective solution to fix the defects detected during the early stages of the software development process. Most organizations perform defect discovery, defect removal, and process improvement which is a part of the defect management process.

Why do you need Defect Management Process?

Following are the various aims of a defect management process:

• Preventing defects
• Early bug detection
• Minimize the impact of bugs
• Resolution of the defect
• Process improvement

Before learning more about the defect management process, it is important to know what a defect is.

What is a Defect/Bug?

When software fives a different output other than the actual business requirement i.e. when we observe a deviation from the actual business requirement then it can be said there is a defect in the software. When a QA team executes test cases, they come across a situation where the actual test results are different from the expected results and this variation is known as a defect/issue. QA teams use different defect management tools to ensure effective defect management.

The Defect Management Process

Defect Prevention

Defect prevention is one of the best methods to eliminate the defects in the early stages of testing, instead of finding the defects in the later stages and fixing them at a higher cost. This method is also cost-effective since the cost incurred on fixing the defects found in the early stages of testing is relatively very low. The major steps for defect prevention are:

• Identifying critical risks – Identify the critical risks in the system which can have a huge impact if they occur during testing or the later stages of the product development process.
• Estimating expected impact – Make sure you calculate how much financial impact would a certain critical risk cause.
• Minimizing expected impact – Once the experts have identified all the critical risks, take the high risks which may be harmful to the system if they try to minimize or eliminate the risk. The risks that cannot be eliminated, reduce the probability of its financial impact.

Deliverable Baseline

When a deliverable reaches a pre-defined milestone then it can be said that a deliverable is a baseline. In this process, the product moves from one stage to another and during the process, the existing defects in the systems also move forward to the next milestone or stage.

Defect Discovery

It is not possible to remove all the defects from the system and make it as defect-free as possible. But you can identify the defect early before they become more costly to the project. Defect discovered means that it is formally brought to the attention of the development team and after analysis of the defect development team also accepted it as a defect.

Defect Resolution

In the defect management process, once the testing team has identified the defects and reported them to the development, they need to utilize defect management tools. Then development team needs to move further with resolving the defects.

Process Improvement

Although the defects in a defect resolution process are prioritized and fixed, it does not mean that low priority defects are not important and do not have a huge impact on the system. All defects that are identified are tagged as critical defects.

Even these minor defects provide an opportunity to learn how to improve the process and prevent any defects from occurring which may impact system failure in the future. Identifying a defect can have a lower impact on the system may not a big issue but the occurrences of such defect in the system are much of an issue.

Everyone in the project needs to look back and see from where the defect was originated. Depending on the defect management tools that a QA team uses, they can make changes in the validation process, base-lining document, review process which may detect the defects early in the process which saves costs.

Conclusion

A defect management process needs to be followed during the overall software development process and not only limited to testing purposes. If a defect appears in the testing phase then a question can be raised that if the defect is caught in this phase then how to deal with the other defects that exist in the system which may cause system failure if it occurs and is not yet discovered.

Author Bio:

Natasha Ramzan is a senior content writer at Latest Businesses. He has written a lot of news and articles for dzone, datafloq, readdive and patch.com.