Seven Principles of Lean Software Development - Build Quality In

December 4, 2008 by Przemysław Bielicki

Picture courtesy of WayTru@flickr

I was doing a quick research for this article using Google trying to find arguments standing for the claim that "quality is expensive". I was trying to find some resources saying that care for quality in the early stages of the software projects doesn't make sense and doesn't pay - I find it very difficult and I cannot share with you any reasonable links (maybe except for this one which refers to another post saying that "Quality Sucks").

What does it mean? It means that software people know that quality is very important. Why then quality of software products sucks in more cases than it rocks?

In many big corporations following waterfall model there is a special team named QA (Quality Assurance). This team's responsibility is (not surprisingly) to assure appropriate level of quality in the software product. This is fine, this is perfectly OK, except that QA is considered as a separate activity. This is the "Verification" or "Testing" box in the waterfall model diagram.
The biggest problem with this attitude is that QA team gets the product after it has been implemented and this is the root cause of all evil. QA is considered as something separate - we first do the product and then we care about the quality. This way of thinking is wrong. You should care about quality from the day one, before you write a single line of code.

Software teams should "build quality in" their products and QA should not be considered as a separate activity. Quality Assurance should be constant process of improving the product - QA activities and people should be involved in the development of the product during the development, not after when the developers are moved to another projects or even teams.

In this post I will try to explain "Build Quality In" principle from "Implementing Lean Software Development - from Concept to Cash" book. I will present few practices that will help your team build software with quality built in.

Synchronize

In order to achieve high quality in your software you should start worrying about it before you write single line of working code. It means that you should write test first and use all the frameworks that will facilitate your test suite (e.g. use mock objects). Track your code coverage - don't be too anal about it because 100% code coverage should not be the goal of your software but use it as an indicator to see which parts of you system should be tested more. And use all other tools that you feel are necessary to test your software thoroughly - unit testing is very often not enough.

Reduce partially done work - tasks that are 90% done usually takes another 90% of total time to finish - keep focused on one task and make it complete, then you can go to the next one. Try not putting defects on a list - stop and fix them the moment you discover them. Known bugs residing in your software will cause more defects in the future - don't allow this to happen (however issue tracking system can be sometimes useful e.g. for collecting requests from your customers).

Integrate your code as soon and as extensively as possible - commit your changes to CVS, SVN, etc. at least once a day and ensure all the tests give you green light. Don't wait with synchronization because it will hurt - you will spend more time on integration than on development. And you will get frustrated.

Automate

Even the best engineers make mistakes - you cannot avoid it - they are not robots (that may make mistakes too, btw.). Eliminate risk of mistakes by automating everything that is routine-work. Almost everything that is a repetitive work can be automated. And you should do this as soon and as early as possible - the best is to have continuous integration engine before committing a single line of code.

You should automate testing, building, installations, anything that is routine, but do it smartly, do it in a way people can improve the process and change anything they want without worrying that after the change is done the software will stop working. Automate in order to make people feel comfortable improving the software, tests, installation process, etc. by changing whatever they feel is necessary.

Refactor

Code in your software product should be as clean and as simple as possible. You can easily ensure it using static code analysers - they really work and can be a real pain in the ass for lousy developers (that's good because they will learn how to write clean code and follow the conventions).

Eliminate code duplication to ZERO - every time it shows up refactor the code, the tests, and the documentation to minimize the complexity. Using modern IDEs it's pretty simple and gives developers fun.

Build Quality In

I hope pieces of advice given above will make it easy to understand how to put "Build Quality In" principle in practice. If you need more detailed description with more examples and more sophisticated explanation you should definitely go to "Implementing Lean Software Development - from Concept to Cash" book.

PS. Other articles in this series can be found here:

1. Respect People
2. Deliver Fast
3. Optimize the Whole
4. Defer Commitment
5. Create Knowledge
6. Eliminate Waste

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