A number of the sessions I've attended here at SD West 2009 cover the same theme: software quality. There are a number of practices that can ensure quality; most of them involve the same thing - feedback.

1. Requirements analysts can build prototypes to get rapid feedback from usability tests before building any code - time frame: hours or days


2. Developers can write a unit test before each bit of production code to get quick feedback - time frame: minutes


3. Business analysts can pair with QA roles to develop acceptance criteria / acceptance tests for each user story - time frame: hours or days


4. Developers can run continuous intergration test suites to get feedback on whether they broke existing functionality - time frame: seconds or minutes


5. Executives and product owners can communicate their vision for the product or feature, so the team can work toward common goals. Team members then can constantly validate what they are working on, and make design choices based on shared understanding of priorities - time frame: continuous


6. QA teams can do exploratory testing on working code to find subtler bugs, usability problems, spelling and grammar mistakes - time frame: hours or days


7. Developers can peer review each others code to find code smells and spot potential bugs early - time frame: hours


8. Developers in some languages can use strong typing systems to their advantage. Strongly typing parameters and return values to validate input and output - time frame: instant


9. Developers can use static analysis tools that help find places your code is likely to do something other than what you intended. Some of these tools are shipped with your compiler or IDE, but you can always get more detailed ones, and you can write your own to enforce local coing standards. These tools can be part of your continuous integration - time frame: seconds or minutes


10. Agile teams can estimate task sizes to identify risks as early as possible - time frame: 1 hour

One thing that was empasized over and over, was that developer and tester are two very different roles. Developers want to write code that works; testers want to break it. Developers will always need that foil, trying to break their code using just as creative techniques as developers are using to write the code in the first place.

TDD is a method of development and code design, not a method of testing. People often get this mixed up because of the name. Even if TDD reduces your bug count by 95%, your QA team will have plenty of work to fill their time, doing whta should have been their role in the first place - exploratory testing: testing the unknown-unknowns (everyone who said this, first felt the need to apologize for the Rumsfeldian phrase - you know they must really mean what they are saying, because nobody's going around quoting Donald Rumsfeld just for the fun of it).