The 30% rule — what reducing production bugs at FPT taught me
A number from my FPT years that I keep coming back to, and what it actually meant.
The cleanest stat on my resume is also the one I'm most careful about. Somewhere in my FPT years we reduced production issues by roughly 30%. Here is what that number actually meant, and what I've been using it to argue ever since.
It wasn't a testing win
The temptation is to credit the test suite. That's not what happened. The 30% came from moving the conversation earlier — getting test cases written during spec review instead of after development.