Negative portions of the phase are identified, along with possible suggestions for improvements. At the end of the meeting, all of the suggestions from this last phase are logged in the action database, along with the causes for all of the errors discovered during the phase. The members of the action team are full-time members of the development staff who devote part of their time to being on the action team. The action team holds regular meetings to evaluate all of the suggestions that come from the causal analysis meetings. The action team decides which suggestions to implement, how to implement them, and who will handle implementing them.
Some suggestions involve developing or enhancing a tool.
Others involve changing a process or getting training for personnel. The action team publishes results from all of their actions in a publicly-accessible repository, in addition to highlighting key results in the organizational newsletter. Feedback is a very important part of the defect prevention process. First, developers need to know that management takes their comments seriously and that they can influence changes in the development environment. Second, the developers need feedback to keep them up to date on current process changes and on what errors other developers discover, so that they do not make the same mistakes themselves.