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Defect Prevention Practices

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I have written numerous times about defect elimination practices such as code reviews, unit testing, and static code analysis tools. From the perspective of lean thinking, however, eliminating defects, no matter how soon after they are introduced, results in waste due to rework to fix the defects. The ideal as far as lean is concerned is to prevent defects from occurring in the first place.

You must be careful, however, that the cost of these defect prevention practices does not become excessive. That would introduce a different type of waste – non-value adding process. The waterfall method of software development is an example of this. One of the principles behind waterfall is that careful requirements analysis and design will minimize downstream defects during coding and testing. Put another way, it is a good idea to understand what you need to build before you start building it. The problems with waterfall arise from going to extremes in applying this principle. Requirements analysis is done up front for the entire project as a big batch based on the theory that it minimizes rework due to future change, but in reality the constant pace of requirement changes plus the learning that occurs throughout the project will result in increasing amounts of change the longer the time spent doing requirements. In contrast, Scrum and Kanban apply this principle using a balanced approach – project level requirements are done at a high level, and the more detailed analysis is done on individual user stories just prior to implementing them. (See for example the article Scrum and CMMI – Going from Good to Great: are you ready-ready to be done-done?.)

In order to effectively adopt a defect prevention practice two pieces of information are needed:

  1. Specific, actionable steps to apply the practice.
  2. The expected benefit. What categories of defects does the practice intend to prevent? This helps determine when to apply the practice and helps to evaluate it after adoption to assess its effectiveness.

If we consider the idea of careful requirements analysis and design mentioned above as a prevention practice, the benefits are fairly clear - prevent requirement and design based errors - but specific actionable steps are missing so it does not qualify. (In fact, this is one of the contributing factors why waterfall projects can end up in the analysis paralysis anti-pattern.)

Now that the groundwork has been laid I can present some specific defect prevention practices. This is not a comprehensive list – many other practices are possible. The practices I have chosen to discuss are ones that I have used and am confident that they work.

Use Understood Methods Rule

The basic formulation of the rule is quite simple: when coding a method only invoke other methods whose behavior you clearly understand and are confident will work the way you want. I have written a separate article providing specific guidance on how to apply this rule.

This practice generally aims to prevent interface errors - which I define generally as defects between two separate pieces of code. Research suggests that a significant proportion of defects are due to these kinds of errors (See for example the paper An Empirical Study of Software Interface Faults.)

I find this rule particularly valuable when applied to the invocation of methods between classes and especially between components. In this case it helps prevent integration errors which are usually not caught by unit testing.

Design by Contract

The idea of design by contract is to precisely specify the behavior of methods to help ensure that they are invoked correctly by callers and that the callers receive the results they are expecting. This is done by precisely specifying the preconditions and postconditions of methods. The chief proponent of design by contract is Bertrand Meyer, whose book Object-Oriented Software Construction is a classic on the topic.

Method preconditions are conditions that must be true in order for the method to successfully execute and fulfill its postconditions. Preconditions are most commonly applied to method arguments. For example, a method to convert a string to a date might have the precondition that the string argument must not be null. Preconditions can also be applied to the state within the class or even external state. For example, a method to delete a particular object from the database might have the precondition that the object exists within the database.

Method postconditions are conditions that the method guarantees to be true after execution, assuming the preconditions are met. Postconditions are most commonly applied to the return value of methods, but like preconditions can also be applied to the state within the class or external state. Returning to the example of a method that converts a string to a date, such a method could have two postconditions. First, that the method will return a corresponding date object that is not null if the input is a string in a valid date format, and second that the method will throw a specified exception if the input does not correspond to a valid date format.

The combination of preconditions and postconditions forms in essence a contract between the method and its caller. The caller promises to fulfill the preconditions in exchange for the method guaranteeing that the postconditions will be met.

Despite the fact that the name of this practice contains the word "design", this approach does not require a separate up-front design of each method. The goal is to have a clear specification of behavior once the method is finished – how you arrive at it is not important to this practice. I tend to start with an initial idea for a method’s contract that I evolve as I write tests and implement the method’s logic using test-driven development.

There are several options for specifying pre- and post- conditions. Some teams rely solely on their automated unit tests to serve as the specification, but I prefer a more concise specification provided as part of the method definition. In Java I typically use JavaDoc to document pre- and post- conditions and programmatically check argument preconditions at the start of the method. I typically formally specify pre- and post- conditions only on methods that are intended for use by other classes or components. In Java, this is typically public and protected methods of interfaces and classes.

This practice is very closely related to the Use Understood Methods Rule, and they go hand-in-hand. Knowing a method’s pre- and post- conditions is necessary to fully understanding it. As I stated above, I tend to only apply formal design by contract to methods intended for use outside the class in question, which means this practice is really aimed at preventing integration defects.

Defensive Coding

Defensive coding is named after the practice of defensive driving and is based on the same mindset of expecting problems to occur and actively taking precautions to avoid them. Defensive coding is applied by adopting a language-specific set of idioms that minimize or prevent common coding errors when using the language. These idioms are often reflected in coding standards.

Here are some examples of defensive coding idioms for Java:

  • When comparing if a variable is equal to a constant, put the constant first. This avoids a potential null-pointer exception (if the variable is null) by invoking the equals() method on the constant, which is never null.
    public boolean isAdmin(String userId) {
      String constant = "admin";
      return constant.equals(userId); // Instead of userId.equals(constant)
    }
    
  • Always use braces to define a block of code for an if, else, while, for, or do statement, even if the block contains only a single line of code. This avoids the problem of later adding a second line of code indented to the same level as the first and mistakenly thinking it will invoked as part of the block.
    public void addOptions(String userId) {
      if (isAdmin(userId)) {
        addAdminOptions();
      } else {
        addRegularUserOptions();
      }
    }
    
  • Use the Java 5 for-each construct rather than using a loop index variable to manually iterate through a list. This avoids the problem of having an off-by-one error in constructing the loop.
     
    public void processOptions(List

Defensive coding aims to minimize coding errors, both at the time of coding and in the future when the code is being modified by others. While these types of errors are typically easily detected by unit testing, I find that using these idioms (after the initial adoption) takes virtually no effort or thought on my part, making them literally a no-brainer to use.

Example-Based Requirements

The idea behind this practice is to express requirements as much as possible in terms of concrete examples rather than the generalized wording typically used in use cases and lists of business rules which is almost always ambiguous. I have written a separate article providing further details on example-based requirements which includes a specific example. :)

The practice of example-based requirements aims at minimizing requirement errors, particularly errors due to misunderstanding or misinterpreting. The examples should also be used as acceptance test cases, in which case they help detect design or coding errors (although unit tests should identify most of these first).

Conclusion

I encourage you to choose one or more of these practices to adopt in your current development work. There will be extra effort initially to understand and become comfortable with a given practice, but this will decline over time as you achieve mastery of it.


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