Determining the Improvement Potential of a Software Development Organization Through Fault Analysis: A Method and a Case Study

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.