DETERMINING SIGNIFICANT FACTORS AND THEIR EFFECTS ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERING PROCESS QUALITY

This paper analyzes the quality of an ongoing software maintenance project by using defect density data from prior and current release changes.The objective is to test the significance of factors such as developer experience, the complexity of the change, the size of the change (measured in lines of code), and the various interactions against the defect density of a particular change.The two phases of the change that deal directly with code and impact quality the most are code design and code development, so they have both been analyzed to see if there are any significant factors.For the significant factors, regression equations have been developed followed by residual analyses.In the Code Design (CD) phase of the software development, developer experience and code change complexity were found to be factors that can impact the cost and schedule of the overall project.For the Code Development Walkthrough (CW) phase, no factors were found to be significant.It is due to high variability in software development and this may change with the addition of more input data.Since defect density is the item of importance in this study, it would be helpful to create upper and lower control limits for different treatment combinations.This would allow the project manager to monitor the process performance and act accordingly to any abnormalities.