You don't want to become complacent. Time Boxing B ringing users into the development process has been a double-edged sword. You deliver what you have and move on to the next step. Not only does time boxing focus the efforts of the development team, it also helps mitigate scope creep, he says. The Quality Process Q uality control, of which testing is a part, is likely to be a most fertile area for the institution of best practices in the IS department, according to most observers.
Numerous studies have shown that the sooner errors are found, the less costly they are to correct.
Too often, developers wait until an application is nearly complete before they show it to those who will use it, thus depriving themselves of critical information that could help them avoid expensive errors. Zubrow advocates software inspections, sometimes referred to as walk-throughs or peer reviews, to help prevent errors from persisting until the software is actually built and sent for testing. Human beings can spot errors in business logic and misunderstandings of requirements that a compiler is likely to miss. Automating these two functions also provides managers information about reported defects and problems and the progress made toward fixing them. A n entire industry is growing around the notion of developing chunks of software that can be snapped together to build application systems in much the same way that automobiles are assembled using manufactured components.