Abstract
Successful software process improvement depends on the ability to analyze past projects and determine which parts of the process that could become more efficient. One typical data source is the faults that are reported during product development. From an industrial need, this paper provides a solution based on a measure called faults-slip-through, i.e. the measure tells which faults that should have been found in earlier phases. From the measure, the improvement potential of different parts of the development process is estimated by calculating the cost of the faults that slipped through the phase where they should have been found. The usefulness of the method was demonstrated by applying it on two completed development projects at Ericsson AB. The results show that the implementation phase had the largest improvement potential since it caused the largest faults-slip-through cost to later phases, i.e. 81 and 84 percent of the total improvement potential in the two studied projects.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Berling, T., Thelin, T.: An Industrial Case Study of the Verification and Validation Activities. In: Proceedings of the Ninth International Software Metrics Symposium, pp. 226–238. IEEE, Los Alamitos (2003)
Bhandari, I., Halliday, M., Tarver, E., Brown, D., Chaar, J., Chillarege, R.: A Case Study of Software Process Improvement During Development. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 19(12), 1157–1171 (1993)
Boehm, B.: Software Engineering Economics. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs (1981)
Cook, E., Votta, L., Wolf, L.: Cost-Effective Analysis of In-Place Software Processes. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 24(8), 650–662 (1998)
Grady, R.: Practical Software Metrics for Project Management and Process Improvement. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs (1992)
Hevner, A.R.: Phase Containment for Software Quality Improvement. Information and Software Technology 39, 867–877 (1997)
IEEE Guide for the Use of IEEE Standard Dictionary of Measures to Produce Reliable Software, IEEE/ANSI Standard 982.2-1988
Wohlin, C., Höst, M., Henningsson, K.: Empirical Research Methods in Software Engineering. In: Conradi, R., Wang, A.I. (eds.) ESERNET 2001. LNCS, vol. 2765, pp. 7–23. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Leszak, M., Perry, D., Stoll, D.: A Case Study in Root Cause Defect Analysis. In: Proceedings of the 22nd Int. Conference on Software Engineering, pp. 428–437. ACM Press, New York (2000)
Shull, F., Basili, V., Boehm, B., Brown, W., Costa, P., Lindwall, M., Port, D., Rus, I., Tesoriero, R., Zelkowitz, M.: What We Have Learned About Fighting Defects. In: Proceedings of the Eight IEEE Symposium on Software Metrics, pp. 249–258. IEEE, Los Alamitos (2002)
Tanaka, T., Sakamoto, K., Kusumoto, S., Matsumoto, K., Kikuno, T.: Improvement of Software Process by Process Description and Benefit Estimation. In: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Software Engineering, pp. 123–132. ACM, New York (1995)
Wohlwend, H., Rosenbaum, S.: Software Improvements in an International Company. In: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Software Engineering, pp. 212–220. IEEE Comput. Soc. Press, Los Alamitos (1993)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2004 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Damm, LO., Lundberg, L., Wohlin, C. (2004). Determining the Improvement Potential of a Software Development Organization Through Fault Analysis: A Method and a Case Study. In: Dingsøyr, T. (eds) Software Process Improvement. EuroSPI 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3281. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-30181-3_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-30181-3_13
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-23725-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-30181-3
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive