A case study in root cause defect analysis

Abstract

There are three interdependent factors that drive our software development processes: interval, quality and cost. As market Dressures continue to demand new features ever more months.network, consisting of circuit packs, ASICs, software units, and a craft terminal. Total head count for this release was 180 people and the development project lasted for 19 rapidly, the challenge is to meet those demands while increasing, or at least not sacrificing, quality. One advantage of defect prevention as an upstream quality improvement practice is the beneficial effect it can have on interval: higher quality early in the process results in fewer defects to be found and repaired in the later parts of the process, thus causing an indirect interval reduction. This release has been a very important and critical one network element product. We subsequently introduced this especially for the European market. Management concern analysis methodology into new development projects as an in-process measurement collection requirement for each for process improvement project retrospective activities, one of them being the root cause major defect MR.defect analysis (RCA) project. Several improvement projects -We present the experimental design of our case study discussing the novel approach we have taken to defect and root cause classification and the mechanisms we have used towards, for example, better effort estimation, more effcient development, and predictable and higher quality (measured in number of defect MRs) have been initiated recently.for randomly selecting the MRs to analyze and collecting the analyses via a web interface. We then present the results of our analyses of the MRs and describe the defects and root causes that we found, and delineate the countermeasures created to either prevent those defects and their root causes or detect them at the earliest possible point in the development process.We conclude with lessons learned from the case study and resulting ongoing improvement activities.

A case study comparing defect profiles of a reused framework and of applications reusing it

“…Construct Validity: Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is often performed on each defect (Leszak et al 2000). One possible threat to construct validity is that we performed our RCA on a summary of all defects.…”

The LEGO strategy: Guidelines for a profitable deployment

“…Simulations based on historical data could help in designing a program looking at a larger timeframe than is currently used in organizations. Figure 3, presents an example of taking a RCA analysis for determining why a project has many defects more than expected [35], and then redrawing it using mind maps, as suggested in [36]. Figure 3a shows the same elements from the original paper, while Figure 3b proposes a refined analysis using the "5why's game", showing 3-4 levels of depth.…”

Deriving a unified fault taxonomy for event-based systems

“…Figure 5 depicts the six categories of fault sources, which have been extracted and compiled from earlier work on fault localization [3,63] and root cause analysis [38]. Where applicable, the fault source description refers back to elements of the model discussed in Section 2.…”