Defect Prevention Approaches in Medium Scale it Enterprises

The software industry is successful, if it can draw the complete attention of the customers towards it. This is achievable if the organization can produce a high quality product. To identify a product to be of high quality, it should be free of defects, should be capable of producing expected results. It should be delivered in an estimated cost, time and be maintainable with minimum effort. Defect Prevention is the most critical but often neglected component of the software quality assurance in any project. If applied at all stages of software development, it can reduce the time, cost and resources required to engineer a high quality product. A small increase in the prevention measure will normally create a major decrease in total quality cost. But the main objective of quality cost analysis is not to reduce the cost, but to make sure that the cost spent are the right kind of cost and that maximizes the benefit derived from that investment. Due to quality cost analysis, the major emphasis has been shifted to prevention of defects. Also over a period of time, it is observed in most of the companies that at some optimum point, the business performance enhances, software quality increases and the cost of quality decreases due to the adoption of effective defect detection and prevention activities. The scope of this paper is to provide a comprehensive view on the defect prevention techniques and practices followed in various software houses. The section 1 of the paper gives introduction to defect terminology, section 2 brings about the need for defect prevention, defect identification is briefed in section 3, section 4 tells about the classification methods followed in different companies. Section 5 describes the various practices, techniques and methodologies adopted towards defect prevention. Sections 6, 7 and 8 talks about defect measurement and analysis, benefits of defect prevention and limitations.