Benefits of the Fagan Defect-Free Process

Client Reported Results

To view actual client comments, please click here.

Many of our other clients have reported similar results:

50% Reduction in Cycle Time (much of this is due to reducing test time and effort);
10 - 20x Reduction in customer reported defects.
50% Increase in meeting schedules and maintaining budget.
2x Increase in Productivity.
40 - 60% Improvement in Customer Satisfaction.

Clients can find and contain over 90% of all life cycle Operational defects (defects that would otherwise be found by testing or through customer use) by inspection, before testing even begins. Teams leave our class quite capable of achieving these results immediately after class.

Many of our clients have internal measurements showing these results. One of our clients published the following results:

Motorola's CEO Quality Award
To Cellular Infrastructure Group, Analog Development, (CIG).

"In CIG's experience, a noteworthy process implemented was Fagan Methodology (by Michael Fagan). This methodology involved a code inspection process for the development of defect-free software. As a result of formalizing our software development process, CIG witnessed the following improvements:

15x reduction in customer reported problems;
2x new feature content of our releases through increased productivity (and improved meeting ship schedules 39%);
41% increase in customer satisfaction with CIG software; and
Formal assessment at SEI Level 3 (PMM).
In addition, this process was deployed throughout the software development life-cycle and applied to requirements, design, coding, test plans, test cases, and, more recently, customer documentation."

- MOTOROLA'S Q-MMUNICATOR, Vol. 16, No. 2

Based upon this success, the training was broadened to other divisions.

One year later, using the same techniques and corporate initiative, further improvements were reported across several divisions of Motorola:

50% Reduction in Cycle Time;
>20x reduction in shipped defect density;
2x Increase in Productivity;
55% increase in customer satisfaction; and
$45 Million estimated cost avoidance for coding defects alone.
(Estimated ROI = 12).

Similar savings can be calculated for document inspections

- Presented at the May 1996 Software Engineering Institute (SEI)/SEPG National Conference.