Investigating the Software Fault Profile of Industrial Projects to Determine Process Improvement Areas: An Empirical Study

Abstract

Abstract. Improving software processes relies on the ability to analyze previous projects and derive which parts of the process that should be focused on for improvement. All software projects encounter software faults during development and have to put much effort into locating and fixing these. A lot of information is produced when handling faults, through fault reports. This paper reports a study of fault reports from industrial projects, where we seek a better understanding of faults that have been reported during development and how this may affect the quality of the system. We investigated the fault profiles of five business-critical industrial projects by data mining to explore if there were significant trends in the way faults appear in these systems. We wanted to see if any types of faults dominate, and whether some types of faults were reported as being more severe than others. Our findings show that one specific fault type is generally dominant across reports from all projects, and that some fault types are rated as more severe than others. From this we could propose that the organization studied should increase effort in the design phase in order to improve software quality.

A Case Study of Source Code Evolution

“…The study reported by Borretzen and Dyre-Hansen [4] is similar to ours in intent: they performed fault analysis to improve software quality. They investigated the fault profiles of five industrial Java/J2EE projects to understand what types of faults are dominant and what types of faults are reported to be more severe.…”

Using Orthogonal Defect Classification to characterize NoSQL database defects

“…Børretzen and Dyre-Hansen [29] characterized faults in five business-critical industrial projects with the goal of determining possible areas of process improvement. Findings include the fact that a certain fault type (Function/Class/Object) generally dominates the bug reports from all projects and that there is a tendency for some fault types to be marked as more severe as others (e.g., relationship, timing/serialization).…”

“…Lutz and Morgan [27] characterized bugs with to discover defect patterns and Durães and Madeira [9] analyzed how software faults can be injected in a source code-independent manner. Børretzen and Dyre-Hansen [29] characterized faults in industrial projects for process improvement. Fonseca and Vieira [22] used ODC to characterize security patches of widely used web applications and Basso et al [21] characterize Java faults to understand their representativeness, including security vulnerabilities.…”

“…In fact, ODC has been applied to a large number of domains, with the exclusion of storage intensive systems -which have now been handled in this work. The closest works (only from a domain perspective) may be the work by Børretzen andDyre-Hansen, 2007 andGupta et al, 2009 which mention transaction tools and document storage, respectively, but do not analyze NoSQL databases, or even databases in general. Alongside with the highly diverse domains, we also observe applications built in different programming languages, with Java being often present.…”

How the Pharmaceutical Industry and Agile Software Development Methods Conflict: A Systematic Literature Review

“…The definition of quality is often mentioned in the literature. According to Børretzen and Dyre-Hansen [22] is quality the reliability to depend on a (computerized) service. According to GAMP5, the pharmaceutical industry standard for software development projects, quality software is "fit for purpose" [12].…”