The Practical Guide to Defect Prevention

Evaluating Your Current Culture

Achieving a quality culture is not just about adopting new values and implementing effective processes but also removing the negative effects of the typical software development process. Many of the values in your organization can have a negative effect on quality. This isn’t surprising because it is not easy to measure the attributes of quality—it’s easy to measure the lack of quality, but such metrics typically become negative factors that inhibit surfacing the issues that can improve quality. Testing, at best, can indicate only a lack of quality.

Reexamine the metrics used to evaluate people in your organization, management priorities, and processes in terms of their effect on the attributes of a quality culture. ...