To have a software process or not to

Well if you are new to programming you are probably not thinking about process, you just sit down and star writing code without having a previos process of determining what to do, well, right now that might work for you, but in big projects, large companies or even for your normal projects a good software process can help you to save time and money, yay!!!

Here are some of the main errors that occur due to the lack of a good process:

• Change control – Some changes might and usually are made either proposed by the customer or the team manager, and this increase the scope of the project and the budget, both by approximately 25 to 50 percent, and this is bad becauseeee, well it doesn´t need an explanation really, who wants to expend more time and money.

• Quality Assurance – If there is no process to eliminate defects on early stages, these are dragged down and later reported at testing at the end, leading to the project been released with many know defects or not being released at all.
• Uncontrolled Revisions – Some major defects discovered late in testing may cause the project to be redesigned or rewritten in this late stage, and since no one planned this, well, everything starts running without any plan.
• Defect tracking – Because this is not planned or it´s done until late stages some defects are not fixed just because they are forgotten and so the project is released with defects.
• Automated source code control – Source code control revision is not established until something goes wrong and someone lose some code file, and well, we don´t want to lose our precious information.

• Scheduling – When the project is behind schedule, developers are asked to reschedule from time to time, making them lose more time.

Even when people think they don´t have a process, they probably just have a very bad one, which normally is like this:

1. Discuss the software that needs to be written.
2. Write some code.
3. Test the code to identify the defects.
4. Debug to find root causes of defects.
5. Fix the defects.
6. If the project isn’t done yet, return to step 1

But this leads lead to all the bad things mentioned earlier, also an error in certain time of the process affects differently, as seen in the next table.