Six Sigma for Software

Six Sigma has been very successfully applied in manufacturing. Is it also applicable to software, and ICT? Six Sigma is about cost reduction by eliminating defects. Six Sigma uses the following three principles: 1. Focus on customers 2. Process orientation 3. Leadership based on metrics Applying Six Sigma to software development makes software projects transparent to both management and customers. Transparency requires an important cultural change. As a result, after transparency is achieved, completing accurate project estimations while meeting both deadlines and customer requirements becomes a lot easier. This paper will explain to readers how to: Achieve transparency; Learn how to implement Six Sigma for managing software development projects; Understand the six steps for managing software development projects and listen to an explanation of how it impacts software development, software testing, project management, and project controlling; Discover the fundamentals for leadership, project management and SW architecture. In this paper we refer to a case study where Six Sigma has been successfully applied in software development. 1. What is Six Sigma? Does it apply to software? Since the early 90’ies, Six Sigma has been extensively used for achieving total customer satisfaction with innovative products at competitive price. Its objectives are to deliver products when promised, without delivered defects, early life failures, or failures during use. 1.1. The Six Sigma Approach Six Sigma [10] is about measuring defects in the value chain process in order to systematically reduce them and therefore the corresponding cost factors. Sigma (represented as σ) is a statistical term that measures the deviation from the target set. A process that executes on 6σ level will yield results within the tolerance interval with 99.99966% probability. Thus 6σ corresponds to only 3.4 defects per 1 million defect opportunities. A defect opportunity is a measurable process result that is critical to customer satisfaction. Six Sigma is not team driven like TQM. It is a management approach. Defect metrics are the main tool for leaders to impact cost and margin. σ σ