Other Tools Related to Quality

You may need other tools to help you deliver quality software. Although there are many ways to report defects, including writing them on story cards or up on the whiteboard, a simple defect-tracking system is a good idea. Issues have a tendency to fall into big, black holes. You can waste a lot of time trying to find out who's supposed to address a particular issue and whether he's done anything about it. Customers will feel more confident about the project's progress if they can look at defect reports showing defects reported and resolved and find out the status of those in between.

Your retrospective meetings are often the time you'll realize you need a new tool for some purpose. Maybe you're having problems with programmers losing code changes and you need better source-code control. Maybe your user-interface tests are taking too much time to maintain. When these types of problems get to the top of your priority list, it's time to search for a new solution.