Software Quality Professional Overview - December 2003

Contents

We continue our series of articles on the application of “Six Sigma” principles to software development, again with additional sidebar material from Jeannine Siviy of the Software Engineering Institute. This issue pairs two contributions on a fundamental appraisal technique.

“Identifying Code-Inspection Improvements Using Statistical Black Belt Techniques,” by Jeff Holmes, relates experiences at Motorola in identifying the significant factors affecting one team’s inspection process. His report leads readers through the steps that were performed and explains the results in terms of software engineering process improvements. A clear bottom-line benefit was increased efficiency of defect identification.

Ellen George and Stephen Janiszewski offer their observations on “Optimizing Software Inspections with Statistical Quality Techniques.” Performance data at Honeywell was drawn from both large and small inspection teams, as well as from single-person bench checks. This article provides data on the correlation between inspection rate and inspection yield, the number of defects identified per code volume inspected, and relative costs of inspection and test.

“Do Quality Certifications Improve Software Industry’s Operational Performance?” George Issac, Chandrasekharan Rajendran, and R. N. Anantharaman’s analysis is too extensive to include in its entirety on these pages, but it is available online.

Similarly, we can only print an introduction to a “Study on Implementing Control Charts Assuming Negative Binomial Distribution with Varying Sample Size in a Software Industry.” The full article by Nandini Das is also online.

The usual wide selection of Resource Reviews concludes this first issue of our sixth annual volume.

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