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Published on Wednesday, February 25, 2004 - 03:13 PM
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Phase Containment Effectiveness
Basics of Phase Containment
Phase containment’s thesis is that project teams should diligently strive
to identify and fix problems at the earliest possible point in the development
life cycle. It is well established that the longer a problem persists, the more
costly it will be to eventually correct. (For example, it is far less costly
to correct an error in the architect’s drawing, than in the finished building).
As the probability of downstream faults grow, so does the likelihood that the
project will suffer substantial costs and delays. As applied to software projects,
phase containment measures the quantity of problems escaping the earliest possible
review (containment) points. The higher the number of escapes, the more likely
the project will experience delays, quality problems and/or cost overruns.
The phase containment metric differentiates between problems uncovered during
in-phase reviews (called errors), from problems that escape the in-phase review
and are discovered at downstream review points (these problems are called defects).
In a perfect world, all design-oriented problems would be discovered in-phase
(i.e. errors) and none would escape to a future phase (i.e. defects). The sum
of errors and defects represents the total project faults, whether caused by
documentation errors, architecture errors, design errors, coding errors, testing
errors, etc. A well-executed project finds a high proportion of the total faults
as early as possible and well before they impact customers.
The distinction between errors and defects is critical and is done via root
cause analysis of each fault. Throughout the project, uncovered faults are
logged and analyzed for how and when they were injected into the design. If
the root cause analysis determines that the fault should have been uncovered
at an earlier review point, the fault is logged as a defect. If the root cause
analysis determines that a fault could not have been caught earlier, it is
logged as an error.
Example
Obtaining the data is not burdensome. PCE data comes from normal design reviews
that ought to be part of everyone’s standard process. The only incremental
effort is capturing the results of these reviews and determining the root
cause of the fault.
Conclusion
A project’s successful outcome is best insured by making adjustments
at the earliest point possible. Small corrections early in the program are
far more effective than massive changes late in the program.
Phase containment has been shown to be an excellent tool to improve a manager’s
insight into a project’s true state.
Radha Sanjay is a Senior Project Manager from Utilities Vertical
of Wipro Technologies.
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Tip of the day:
Establish an environment where reporting bad news in a timely manner is encouraged rather than an environment where fear prevents the flow of critical information.
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