Tip No. 1: Consider common failuresMistakes happen. They are part of what makes us human. Trying to prevent every mistake turns out to be horribly expensive and inefficient.
Repeating mistakes over and over again is optional.
The Japanese term for avoiding repeated mistakes is "poka-yoke"; loosely translated, it means "mistake proofing." Cars manufactured by Toyota, for example, use RFID chips combined with a seat-pressure check to prevent drivers from locking their keys in the car.
Every hour spent documenting is an hour spent not testing.Mistake proofing applies to software, too. Finding the common defects in software can be as simple as running a query in your bug-tracking system. Once you have a list of the last two hundred bugs, invest an hour or two in looking at each defect to determine the root cause. When a root cause occurs more than once, that presents an opportunity for improvement. (If your team fixes bugs as they occur and doesn't do bug tracking, you might keep a list for a month, then throw it away.)
One company I worked with that applied this particular software testing technique found a great number of problems with transparent images in older browser versions. To fix the problem, we simply established a policy that all images be in Portable Network Graphics format, instead of the Graphics Interchange Format. With the new policy in place, that defect went from a weekly occurrence to a memory.
And of course, the less time the team spends documenting, fixing and retesting, the faster they deliver the product to market.
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