1/10/100 Rule

Quality Assurance wasn't born with advent of computer software. Manufacturing had QA for many years before computers came along, so it's wise to learn from their experience. It has been long understood that the earlier defects are found, the less they cost to fix. That's the essence of the 1/10/100 rule. The rule states:

If a defect is found in the Design Stage, it costs $1 to remedy. If it is found in the Production Stage, it costs $10 to remedy. If it is found by Quality Assurance Testing, it costs $100 to remedy.

Let's see how that looks in the context of the SDLC:

1) Initiation
2) System Concept Development
3) Planning
4) Requirements Analysis
5) Design $1 (opportunity)
6) Development $10 (opportunity)
7) Integration and Test $100 (too late)
8) Implementation
9) Operations and Maintenance
10) Disposition

From this mapping, it's really obvious how important good design is. It's not difficult to come up with examples of products that flopped fabulously because of poor designs. Design reviews are extremely important to quality because defective designs are often too expensive to ever be fixed. Total Quality Management (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TQM) teaches us that we should, "Do the Right Things Right". Implementing the wrong thing with high quality is an obvious waste of effort. QA must therefore be active and strong partners during design. Design defects that escape the design phase should be considered failures of the preceding quality processes.

It's also obvious that the next opportunity to drive quality is during development. The common view that software quality is something that only QA engineers worry about after development very clearly multiplies the costs of finding and repairing bugs by 10. Remember Mom's advise, "If you don't have time to do it right, how will you have time to do it twice?" Defects that are found by QA should therefore also be considered failures of the preceding quality processes.

The QA engineer standing at the end of the car assembly line doesn't expect to find defects. His job is to determine whether the car is of sufficiently high quality to sell. At that point, all defects should have already been found and rectified. Every defect he finds indicates: 1) a flaw in manufacturing, and 2) a flaw in the preceding quality processes. This is the philosophy we must cultivate in building our SQA processes.

If we want to produce high quality software repeatably, SQA processes must be designed with the 1/10/100 Rule in mind. Finding bugs during qualification testing is just too late and way too expensive.


Todd Shoenfelt
http://www.linkedin.com/in/toddshoenfelt