Do It Right the First Time
Sometime during the testing phase of your project, if not
latter, a defect, an error is found. The project is put on hold until the
problem(s) are corrected. Now you are behind schedule and possibly over budget. You hear the staff saying, “We never have
time to do it right but always seem to have time to fix it.” I’ve said it as an
engineer and heard it numerous times as a manager. It got me wondering what is
there in the program quality tool box that could help this all too common
situation. Engineers will want to take
forever and program managers will want it yesterday, tomorrow if you are lucky.
The answer, peer inspections. These are sometimes called reviews, audits,
or walk through. It doesn't matter what they are called. It matters that you have them and they are
set up and done correctly. I will use
the term inspection as it sounds more formal and that is just what it needs to
be, formal. Having inspections in the development phase allows for rapid design
with the knowledge that errors and defects will be caught before anything is
built.
There are 3 main parts of the inspection;
1)
Set up – Possibly the most critical step.
Picking the participants for the inspection will lead to success or failure. Giving
the participants preparation time with the inspection material is also critical
2)
Conduct the inspection – Seems simple enough and
if you have a good inspection leader, it is. Once again I like what CMMI® says
about inspections. “The focus of the peer review should be on the work product
in review, not on the person who produced it.”
3)
Review the results – This should be easy but it
isn't. The easy part, errors and defects
have been found and can be corrected before time and money is spent on
fabrication. The hard part,
inappropriate use of the inspection data. You want to know how to stifle
inspections and cause the process to be abandoned? Have some manager,
functional or program, start to use the results in performance evaluation. And that is just one inappropriate use I have
seen.
Inspections are not to be the end all to Program Quality,
but without them, your chances of doing it right the first time are slim and
none.
