A World Without Defects

If there were a Nobel Prize for software, they say, Michael Fagan would have been one of its first recipients for creating his now internationally renowned Fagan Inspection Process. As a long-time IBM employee, Fagan recognized product quality problems derived directly from defects in the code and documentation that failed to satisfy user requirements. To address these problems, Fagan devised his software inspection process as a way to reduce the number of defects reaching users and to remove defects before testing in order to lessen the workload on overburdened testing operations, and make development projects both measurable and manageable.

Fagan pioneered the early adoption of inspections in the 1970s and later oversaw their evolution. Now the many organizations committed to initiatives such as the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) or Six Sigma in the interest of delivering superior quality, share the practice of inspections. While many organizations are reticent in speaking openly about the value of inspections, former ANZ Bank CIO David Boyles, expressing astonishment at the numbers who had apparently never heard of either Fagan or his invention, once called the Fagan Inspection Process "one of the most effective and efficient ways to move an organization up the CMM ladder without even talking about CMM". In starting the organization up the CMM ladder, Boyles's first step was to introduce the Fagan Inspection Process.

The ANZ's Bangalore IT shop in India, which made it to CMM Level 5 during Boyles's tenure, and its Investment Bank unit in Melbourne, used both TQM and the Fagan Inspection Process as a way to move up the CMM ladder. As a way of getting everyone using the same processes and ways of doing things, Boyles during his time at ANZ told CIO magazine he found Fagan very effective, providing immediate benefits in cycle times and quality.

IBM has also adopted the Fagan Inspection Process as part of its development methodology.

"In the telecommunications industry we have used this technology that is a part of our delivery methodology and part of our broader CMMI [CMM Integration] approach and we've obtained CMMI Level 5 in our commercial delivery part of the business," says IBM application management services (AMS) development manager Andrew Bowey. "The Fagan style of inspection is an integral part of that and we've realized significant and dramatic reductions in production problems through using this process. It's a very, very formal, rigorous inspection process and it is certainly how IBM does their inspections. We use it basically in all of our clients because it is part of our methodology."

Since 1989, when Fagan formed Michael Fagan Associates, he has continued to refine the methodology and has also found ways to help facilitate its very rapid implementation in more than 70 organizations. In fact, most of these organizations have produced impressive results in the product or release on which they were working starting the day after completing training.

In time the process evolved to become the Fagan Defect-Free Process - a methodology that is credited with dramatically reducing the number of defects (by up to 20 times) in software and hardware products, increasing the feature content per release, shortening cycle time by up to 50 percent, increasing customer satisfaction, improving development processes, accelerating SEI CMM (Software Engineering Institute CMM) maturity in organizations, and significantly reducing costs.

Yet many organizations fail either to understand fully or to exploit software inspections.

"I think that a lot of people do realize the importance of inspections and a lot of companies that you wouldn't think would be doing inspections do them and a lot of companies you do think would be doing inspections don't," says John Salerno, director of software engineering with South Australian-based Dedicated Systems. "I guess to be honest companies that have been burnt are more likely to use [inspections] because what we find is that inspections are valuable for this reason: that it finds bugs where they are injected, which is usually by the engineers themselves in the development team."