An Industrial Case Study on Improving Quality in Integrated Software Product using defect dependency

Product based organizations have diverse product offerings that meet various business needs. The products are in turn integrated to create integrated product suites. Rigorous product engineering is a must for creation of high quality integrated software products. Adequate measures must be taken to improve quality of the integrated product before every release of its module or sub-product. It is hard to imagine upgrading an integrated software product with unidentified defects prior to its release. In this paper, we share our observations on implementing a defect dependency metric to identify the dependency of a defect over a real-time industry defect dataset of an integrated software product. This defect dependency metric was captured and analyzed during release cycle(s) to avoid surprise issues post product launch. Keywords—integrated software products; software quality; defect; defect dependency; software metric; product development; rough-set theory; defect widespread