Introduction to the Personal Software Process

17 Design Defects

This chapter discusses design defects, the design process, and design representations. It also addresses methods for reducing the number of design defects you inject. The principal issue in managing design defects is to understand when and how you inject them. For the assignment, you will analyze the design defects in your programs and determine when and why they were injected.

17.1 The Nature of Design Defects

Many of the defects you find in test were probably injected during the coding phase. This implies that the principal defect problem is with simple coding errors. In fact, for the defects they found in test, 14 students in one of my courses injected half again as many defects during coding as they did during design. ...