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by Keith Ray.
Original Post: Low Defect Rates
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Martin Fowler writes about a few XP projects he's aware of that have very low defects rates: one bug report per month, or even one bug report per year. Whenever I've mentioned such a thing to people in the past (there's been a few other projects reporting significant reductions of bug-rates when they started doing XP - the ones Fowler mentions are new to me), they can't believe if. Their immediate reaction to reply with a comment like: "yeah, because they have no users or no software", or suggest that the people reporting these bug-rates are lying.
As I've mentioned before, Weinberg's Laws of consulting: ""In spite of what your client may tell you, there is always a problem.... Never promise more than a ten percent improvement. (If it were possible to achieve more than a ten percent improvement, there must have been a problem, but there isn't a problem, so...)"
When people talk about Extreme Programming, they often focus on such things as its adaptive planning style, or its evolutionary approach design. One small but growing trend that particularly interests me is the small but growing number of XP projects that have very low defect rates, by which I mean less than one production bug per month.
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