Relative Effectiveness of Quality Techniques

The various quality-assurance practices don't all have the same effectiveness. Many techniques have been studied, and their effectiveness at detecting and removing defects is known. This and several other aspects of the "effectiveness" of the quality-assurance practices are discussed in this section.

Percentage of Defects Detected

If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.

Gerald Weinberg

Some practices are better at detecting defects than others, and different methods find different kinds of defects. One way to evaluate defect-detection methods is to determine the percentage of defects they detect out of the total ...

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