This practical, hands-on guide captures, categorizes, and builds a process of best practices to avoid creating defects during the development process—rather than fixing them after extensive analysis. While there are various proprietary and competing standards for reducing software defects, these methods suffer from issues surrounding timeliness, effectiveness, or cost. What’s more, many other books focus on fixing errors after they’ve been introduced. This guide, however, presents practical methods for reducing defect introduction through prevention and immediate detection and by moving the detection of defects closer to their introduction. Written by experts with over a century of software development experience among them, this book is not an idealized academic book. Instead, it distills many hard-won lessons into a single, workable lifecycle process that will help deliver better quality software.