How to reduce Production defects

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Permalink Reply by Behbood Hussain on September 30, 2011 at 5:08am

Defects in production can be due to many reasons. However, for keeping it simple and to further educate to the customer (or client), I suggest highlighting on the following points:

 

1. Understand that testing is an activity that is never-ending, but due to budget and time constraints, it has to eventually come to an end.

2. There might be some functionalities that might not be tested thoroughly end-to-end due to your test environment limitations. These always are a risk on the night the code deploys into production.

3. Never compress the testing schedule. Testing is usually the final gate before an applications gets release 'in the wild'. Hence, the timelines should never be compromised and proper care and governance should be in place to ensure that the testing activities are completed as per the details in the test plan.

4. Start incorporating Quality management tools such as: Six Sigma, TQM and others into your businesses to save cost and to improve the overall process from inception to deployment.

 

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Permalink Reply by Samrat Jha. on September 30, 2011 at 11:02am

 

 Yes ... Being a tester its our responsibility to decrease the availability of defects in System before it is handed over to customer ... ...   I am writing a few points which reduces defects ...

 

1) Start testing early...

2) Prioritize the requirements ..

3) Focus on Static testing ... ( which reduces fault multiplication )

4) Test Ideal path and Critical path of the system ..

5) Have regular communication with the Customer ..

6) If Possible try to have communication with expected users of the System to be developed ..

7) Go for Formal testing followed by Error guessing ...

8) Identify the risk associated with the system and follow risk based strategy of testing ... 

9) Prepare RTM ... so that it can help you in cross confirmation of test coverage ..

10) Focus on Use case based testing ...  have skilled resource in the team and provide them realistic schedule ..

11) Provide necessary training to all the resourced to be involved in testing .....

 

Hope it will help You...  

 

Regards:

Samrat Jha..

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Permalink Reply by Larry W. Shackelford on September 30, 2011 at 6:52pm

 

What is your objective for this presentation? Do you have low customer satisfaction with your product?

 

I would recommend you turn the presentation into a positive one. In other words, here is what we have done to reduce production defects. I assume you could present what you are doing with the root cause analysis of customer service reports and added additional test coverage in the regression suite. The customer would also like to know about the new features and how you are growing your facility, test coverage and technical expertise. This is where you can invite the customer in and get them involved in test coverage and acceptance. It will also get buy in and address concern of production defects. Discussing the regression suite growth, timing, facility and areas of risk each time you ship can leverage a verification office or use of facilities by borrowing the customers environment. It should also be used to control the ramp into production with everyone involved. Formal communications in test plans or reviews will help in awareness.

 

A huge undertaking but well worth the while to address Customer Satisfaction is a dedicated team. In a previous role we called the team Customer Service Robustness Team consisting of top 20 dissatisfied customers, Product test, , manufacturing, Design, Product Owners, Customer Service and a Director/VP to sponsor the group. Using tools like SurveyMonkey to receive 360 feedback and consolidate a clear message on complaints, or face to face, whatever is convenient to gain an understanding of their dissatisfaction.

At the end of the review we had issued and documented by trouble tickets, high level view of hardware, software, process, test coverage, training, technical bulletins that we could manage. It took almost a year and a half to address the different issues but at the end of the next customer service survey the involvement and action planned raised the customer satisfaction level to 93% from 72%.

 

Sorry if I missed the boat on your question but this was my take away.

 

Maybe publish your presentation prior to customer review for feedback. Always interested..... 

 

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