In the race of first-to-market, the quality is often compromised. However, now, organizations are starting to realize that being first-to-market isn’t everything and is certainly not more important than the quality of the product. Customers will stop using a product if it’s full of bugs. A paradigm shift from traditional waterfall project management to more agile ways of working in the software development industry has yielded many benefits, one of which is defect resolution. In this article, I will list down some practical steps on how to get a potentially high defect situation under control before your project team is overrun by bugs and your delivery timeline ultimately suffer as a result.
Build Quality Measures
For a product to be successful, quality is imperative and the number of defects says a lot about it. Simple measures such as desk checks on developed features or peer-reviewing can help you stop and reflect to spot issues before they make their way through the various test and UAT environments before wasting additional time and thus money.
Don’t Panic
During the course of the project, you may encounter panic among your stakeholders and team members. This happens usually in the critical stages of the project where you’ll have to resist all urges to become overwhelmed and in a state of panic. Your delivery team requires you to be consistent with your decision making through calm and rational thinking. This will give a positive message to your stakeholders that you’re in control and well-aware of the situation. Quick decisions made in a panic can only worsen the problem.
Be Factual
Most agile issue tracking tools provide robust reporting functionally. To bring the defect count down, it’s important to start with understanding the rate at which defects are being logged and closed. Using this data, you can accurately report the stakeholders on factual grounds rather than emotive feeling.
Defect Prioritization
Be careful with how you manage the defects. Make sure that you’re putting your efforts on more important defects. Because every hour you spend on resolving a defect comes with an opportunity cost of that hour not spent on another defect. Time is a scarce resource as well. In a perfect world, defects do not exist. But this is not a perfect world. It’s better to focus your time on potential showstopper defects of high priority and work towards the more trivial hereafter.
Conclusion
It’s a common saying, “calm waters never made a good sailor”. If you look at the brighter side, defects teach you a lot of important lessons. I’ve discussed this in detail in another article of mine, Are Defects a Blessing in Disguise? Nonetheless, there’s no denying that everyone wants to get rid of defects as they should. For that, you need a proper, well-planned process in place and reliable issue tracking tools to start with.
