Stop Finding Bugs, Start Building Quality

Many testers believe that their job is to find bugs. While finding bugs is indeed an important aspect of testing, detecting bugs earlier or preventing them from ever occurring has a far greater impact on improving software quality. You have probably seen charts showing the exponential increase in cost of fixing bugs late in the product development cycle; yet despite calls to "move quality upstream", the end of the product cycle is where many software projects focus their testing efforts. Long time Microsoft tester Alan Page will discuss how common functionality, security, and performance bugs can be prevented or detected much earlier on software projects of any size using simple scripts, or tools such as a source code compiler or FxCop.

• Causes of common bugs
• Analyze source code
• Make detection techniques automatic