Q: What first inspired you to develop the Fagan Defect-Free Process and the Fagan Inspection Process?

Michael Fagan: I began my career as an electrical engineer and an enthusiastic student of physics - I like to measure things. I joined IBM as an engineer and later became a product development manager, responsible for overseeing a number of projects and keeping them on time and within budget. IBM was a very fine company, but we had a number of projects coming in late in a number of departments. I knew I had to take some action to reverse this trend, so I worked with several of my colleagues to perform some analyses of what was happening and we found that there were defects in some of our designs that were causing the delays. In some cases we were twelve weeks behind schedule and way over budget. So we designed and implemented an organized process to search for design defects at a very early point in the development process and eliminated them before they could become a problem and cause delays and budget overruns.

Q: Was this hardware development or software development?

Michael Fagan: Initially I managed IBM hardware products, but after we developed processes to uncover and resolve hardware design defects I was invited to join the IBM software development team, where products were more often late than on schedule. Not only were they late but they also were being released with defects. This reflected badly on the company and the defects were costly to fix. I became a manager of a software department and we began to apply the same techniques to develop software more quickly and with better ultimate quality. As I worked on subsequent software products, I was able to continue development and refinement of the method of inspecting software requirements, design and code to find defects. We developed and advanced the concept of software inspections that worked very well in removing defects from software early in the development cycle. This resulted in much higher quality and very significant reductions in shipped defects, shorter development cycle times and reduced costs.

Q: And those inspections are known today throughout the industry as "Fagan Inspections?"

MF: Well, yes, some of my colleagues were kind enough to use my name to differentiate this particular technique from others with a similar name and this name seems to have stuck. They did this because there are distinctive characteristics of this technique that are not shared by the others.

Q: For some reason, it seems that you are being modest.

MF: It has been my experience over the years that the best work is done by teams and I have been fortunate to work on a number of very good ones.

Q: How did you evolve the techniques you developed at IBM into what is known today as the Fagan Defect-Free Process?

MF: The Fagan Defect-Free Process is the trade name that we use to describe the techniques that we teach in our training courses. After a very satisfying career with IBM and some years as a visiting professor at the University of Maryland, I founded my own company as a vehicle for me to independently continue refining my techniques and teach them to many other companies outside IBM.

Q: And in the time since you founded Michael Fagan Associates, you have trained how many people in how many companies?

MF: My associates and I have trained many thousands of people in perhaps a hundred or more global corporations and numerous more small companies.

Q: I have a list here that says your clients include famous names like BAE Systems, British Aerospace, Cisco Systems, Discover Card, Ford Motor, Intuit, Lockheed Martin, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, Motorola, Pacific Bell, Siemens and Xerox.

MF: And also some not so famous companies, who do excellent work. We work with companies of all sizes in many different industries all over the world. We like to say that The Fagan Defect-Free Process is appropriate for any kind of product. If it's possible for a product to have a defect of some kind, our process can help improve the quality of that product to make customers happier and companies more profitable.

Q: For the layman, who is not an engineer, can you describe what you teach?

MF: Our training course is very detailed and very precise. But here is a simplified description of what it includes. We focus on three key components: Formal Process Definition, the Fagan Inspection Process, and Continuous Process Improvement. There are many other components in our training, but those are the three core ideas. Engineers learn skills apply them to their work right after the class. About 90% of class participants have rated the course's value as good to excellent.

Q: So let's go over those one by one. How do you create a formal process definition?

MF: In general terms, we take a survey of class members and ask them to describe their daily process. We ask them how well it is defined, how well it is executed, and how it affects the final work product. Then we teach them practical, proven methods to design and define measurable and manageable processes that improve the overall quality of their products.

Q: What about the Fagan Inspection Process?

MF: In the class, we teach people a seven-step process of inspecting the deliverables that they have created at the end of each phase of development. These include market requirements, product requirements, design and code, hardware design, project plans, resource plans, test plans and test cases. Then we perform actual inspection case studies designed to help them master critical new skills. Analysis after each case study helps them sharpen their newly learned skills to perform inspections of increasing effectiveness.

Q: And continuous process improvement?

MF: This is where our students learn to identify systemic defects. Systemic defects are defects or anomalies in the development process that can create defects in the products that are created by that process. We teach specific techniques to identify and remove systemic defects and in doing so we help our clients to continuously improve their work processes.

Q: Thank you for keeping those answers simple. We know that your course is much richer than what you have just described, but I think it valuable for us to have a general overview.

MF: No one should be intimidated by what we teach, because our goal is to motivate every single member of the development team to perform his or her job better, so they feel good about it. Because many people resist change, we work very hard to motivate them to make changes that will improve their work processes and ultimately create better products.

Q: Who do you generally see in your classes?

MF: We train software and hardware developers, directors, senior managers, project managers, systems engineers, test engineers, quality assurance engineers, process and metrics managers and others who are involved in product development. We prefer to train entire project teams together. We prefer to work with whole project teams, including managers, or a portion of a team working on a product. We want those who work on the same product to participate in the same class because this makes implementation of what is learned smoother and quicker. Our objective is to encourage implementation of our techniques the very day after the class.

Q: What do your client companies gain by using the Fagan Defect-Free Process?

MF: We have received documented reports from our clients showing that they have reduced the time needed to develop new products by as much as 50 percent. Some of them have told us that that their customer-reported defects have dropped by as much as 95 percent and they've experienced a 60 percent increase in customer satisfaction. We've also heard that schedules and budgets are met twice as often as before and that productivity among members of the development team has doubled.

Q: It is expensive for a company to put its people through your training course?

MF: My answer might appear to be less than objective, so let me relate what one of my customers told me. She said it would be more costly for her company if they did not train their people to implement the Fagan Defect-Free Process. Fagan Associates' clients typically invest many thousands of dollars in the training curriculum, but then they experience immediate improved productivity, reduced cycle times, budget savings, and enhanced product margins that are often many times greater than what they've spent on the training. Some of our clients have carefully calculated the ROI they get from our training program. They find that when inspections are introduced into the requirements phase and applied to design and coding, the ROI breaks even after ten or twenty percent of the testing is complete. In several cases, ROI goals were met by the last day of the class. As the finance people say, the ROI on the Fagan Defect-Free Process is immediate and very compelling.