Enhancing Defect Removal Eff ic iency Using Adoption Rate for Released Products

The increasing emphasis on quality software has prompted the need for better software quality management using data driven and statistical methods. Various measures of development and released software quality have been created to make the process measurable, repeatable, and continuously improving. Defect Removal Efficiency (DRE) is one of the commonly used metrics for measuring the efficiency of defect removal at various stages of the software development life cycle. By extrapolating the DRE metric to released products, an organization can measure the effectiveness of their quality assurance process based on the number of defects found in the product before and after its release. A couple of key aspects that this metric fails to account for are the “number of customers” using the product and the “amount of time” a product has been out in the market. This paper accounts for these two key aspects and incorporates them as a measure of “product adoption” while calculating the Defect Removal Efficiency. The paper also analyzes the effect of various parameters on the metric, which unearths more meaning from the metric value. Enhancing Defect Removal Eff ic iency Using Adoption Rate for Released Products