“Don’t fix issues later; fix them now ” or “Never put off to tomorrow what you can do today”. This seems so obvious but try doing it in a project when the schedule and budget are under pressure. If this is restricted to Software Testing then issue classification and prioritisation can help to clarify which issues are worth fixing and which can be safely left for a future release.
However, if the issue relates to a process used in the project, then not only does the issue potentially impact the schedule and budget at the time it is discovered, but it will impact the project each time that process is repeated. Fixing it now will not only save the current project time and money; it will save the coming projects a lot more assuming it is documented and the fix is implemented. Some processes we have seen add time and budget to a project include the following:
- Failure to classify defects and move them to the relevant group allowed one person to repeatedly reclassify defects and change priorities until the software vendor bogged down in multiple half completed code changes.
- Moving ahead with documentation that had not been fully reviewed and approved lead to more changes and a huge recoding effort. In particular, adding an approval step to every piece of documentation in a system meant opening every function to code an extra step.
- Failure to agree on defect metrics lead to inconsistent counts and hours wasted reconciling expectations between the vendor and client.
Fixing any of these would have saved millions of dollars and years of time on the project.
Software Quality Assurance solves problems for yesterday, today and tomorrow.
