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I am currently reading The Art of Agile Development that I've bought at Javapolis last year, but I did not get to it sooner.

I am close to middle of it and I am sure it is the best book I have read about agile development, because it says what, why, how, when not and alternatives (if they exist).

What inspired this post was reading chapter No Bugs. I could not stop thinking about it and I have shown it to all colleagues in my team. It contains something that should cause envy among the most of programmers.

However, XP teams can achieve dramatically lower bug rates. [Van Schooenderwoert]'s team averaged one and a half bugs per month in a very difficult domain. In an independent analysis of a company practicing a variant of XP, QSM Associates reported an average reduction from 2,270 defects to 381 defects [Mah].

and later on

For example, [Van Schooenderwoert] delivered 21 bugs to customers. Working from Capers Jones' data, Van Schooenderwoert says that a "best in class" team building their software would have generated 460 defects, found 95 percent of them, and delivered 23 to their customer. In contrast, Van Schooenderwoert's team generated 51 defects, found 59 percent of them, and delivered 21 to their customer. At 0.22 defects per function point, this result far exceeds Capers Jones' best-in-class expectation of two defects per function point.

It is very hard to imagine something like that even I think projects I've been working for last few years were better than average regarding bug count (I have no data to prove that to you or even me, it is just feeling).

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