Reducing Production Defection – Actionable Tips Inside

We all make mistakes. For example, forgetting to switch out the lights before leaving the house or mistakenly cutting off another car on the way to work are examples of such mistakes. As a software engineer, it may be inadvertently adding a flaw into the team’s most recent software product. While errors are unavoidable during development, they can be detected, repaired, or completely avoided before reaching the production environment. We’ll look at a few strategies for decreasing production defects in this blog, which will enhance overall software quality, decrease regressive issues, enhance inter-team communication, and promote customer experience.

Change the Way Your Team Think About Defects

Many businesses and organizations have a bad habit of seeing defects from a distorted and harmful perspective. Defects are unavoidable at some point throughout the software development life cycle, but many conventionally managed businesses see defect and error management as a binary fight to keep the problems at bay. Rarely is it acknowledged that flaws will occur and that healthy mechanisms to deal with them must be designed and implemented.

While mistakes in development are unavoidable, the objective should be to build processes and processes that make identifying, debugging, and resolving faults easier. These procedures should be established early in the development life cycle, and they should be regularly enhanced. When good procedures are in place, flaws may become a rare surprise, like spotting a digital unicorn on a faraway hill – you didn’t anticipate it, but you’re delighted you did, and you want to learn more about it.

This adjustment in mentality may be tough, especially for well-established businesses that are accustomed to more traditional approaches to flaws, but it must be a top-down process. Executives and managers must shift their mindsets from accepting that errors are unavoidable (especially in production) to viewing bugs as extraordinary. This adjustment in perspective will gradually filter down across the organization, resulting in a paradigm shift in groupthink attitudes about flaws. This will pave the way for improvements in the way the company handles problems, resulting in a significant reduction in production faults.

Analyze Software Requirements in Depth

Set aside an appropriate amount of time on a regular basis (weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc.) to meet with the project’s managers and development leaders to review the project’s particular software needs. This method should determine both the overall application’s needs as well as precise component- or feature-specific needs. The main advantage of this method is that it uncovers possible traps and prevents a significant number of unneeded errors from occurring later on.

For example, during a software requirements analysis meeting, your team may determine that the previously intended data layer implementation (such as AWS) would not function with a needed third-party component, necessitating a change in needs to another solution (such as Azure). Failure to detect such a problem early in the development life cycle can result in a plethora of uncomfortable difficulties, and if neglected long enough, can result in a bevy of production faults that might have been avoided.

Refactor your code on a regular basis

After you’ve established a strong method for developing acceptable software requirements, the next habit to develop is organization-wide code reworking techniques. Refactoring is a technique for improving and reorganizing old code without changing its essential function. Fixing incorrectly named variables or methods, and condensing duplicated code into a single method or function, are two simple instances of refactoring.

Peer review should be included in the code self-review process. Many businesses have found considerable success using pair programming methodologies, in which two people sit together during real code development, one producing code and the other observing. While this method increases the number of man-hours required to write each line of code, studies show that code written in pairs has 15% fewer faults than code written by solo programmers.

The key to reducing production defects through any form of code review is to make sure that the procedures your company has formed are used frequently — repetition will start creating habitual processes that will inevitably capture potential issues and existing defects even before they touch the production environment.

Many companies outsource the code refactoring process. A security testing company has an army of code reviewers who have only one mission – Find defects and patch them asap.

Aggressive Regression Testing 

Regression testing is a type of software testing that verifies or disproves the functioning of software components after they’ve been changed. If a flaw is detected after a modification to a software component, regression testing is necessary to confirm the problem and attempt to repair it. Regression testing should preferably be carried out on a frequent basis, such as after each change, at the end of each day, weekly, bi-weekly, and so on. When a previously found issue has been resolved, regression tests should usually be run.

In general, the more regression testing that can be done, the more issues that can be detected and fixed, and the more stable the application will become, resulting in a significant reduction in production defects.

Perform a Defect Analysis

Because faults will inevitably arise at some point throughout the software development life cycle, it’s critical that your team maximizes the value they give. A fault, in particular, gives a chance to conduct an in-depth examination of the software’s affected components and make changes to all areas that were harmed. Although the kind of analysis used by your company will be unique to your team and application, there are a few crucial concepts to bear in mind while determining the root cause of any particular defect:

Rely on Expert Team Members: Quality Assurance departments are useful and frequently required for large projects, but don’t forget about the members of your development team who were directly engaged in the creation of the code or components that created the issue. The purpose of identifying these folks is not to cast judgment or guilt on them, but to enable them to evaluate the problem and come up with the most elegant solution.

Aim to Improve Quality: Above all, the suggestions and techniques outlined in this article are intended to improve the quality of the program in future iterations and production releases. As a result, defect analysis should try to both avoid flaws and find any that do fall through the gaps as soon as feasible.

Prioritize Systematic Flaws: Throughout the average development life cycle, there will inevitably be a number of regressive defects – flaws that recur despite the team’s best attempts to eliminate them. Such systemic faults should be addressed and aggressively focused on during the analysis phase, as they will have the greatest influence on total defect rates.

Error-monitoring software can help a lot

Exception monitoring and reporting systems that are automated guarantee that your team is aware of faults as soon as they arise. For all of your development projects, use a solution that enables real-time error monitoring and automated exception reporting.

Read this article to find out what things you should look for when selecting a test management tool.

A Detailed Guide To Select The Best Test Management Tool | Kualitee

You can either hire a separate department for catching and eliminating defects in production or hire a professional security testing team who does the job for you.