[go: up one dir, main page]
More Web Proxy on the site http://driver.im/ skip to main content
10.5555/2396167.2396193guideproceedingsArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesConference Proceedingsacm-pubtype
Article

Investigating the software fault profile of industrial projects to determine process improvement areas: an empirical study

Published: 26 September 2007 Publication History

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.

References

[1]
Grady, R.: Practical Software Metrics for Project Management and Process Improvement. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs (1992).
[2]
Børretzen, J.A., Stålhane, T., Lauritsen, T., Myhrer, P.T.: Safety activities during early software project phases. In: Proceedings, Norwegian Informatics Conference (2004).
[3]
Børretzen, J.A., Conradi, R.: Results and Experiences From an Empirical Study of Fault Reports in Industrial Projects. In: Münch, J., Vierimaa, M. (eds.) PROFES 2006. LNCS, vol. 4034, pp. 389-394. Springer, Heidelberg (2006).
[4]
Mohagheghi, P., Conradi, R., Børretzen, J.A.: Revisiting the Problem of Using Problem Reports for Quality Assessment. In: ICSE'06. Proc. the 4th Workshop on Software Quality, Shanghai, May 21, 2006, pp. 45-50 (2006).
[5]
ISO: ISO/IEC 9126 - Information technology - Software evaluation - Quality characteristics and guide-lines for their use. ISO (December 1991).
[6]
Laprie, J.-C.: Dependable computing and fault tolerance: Concepts and terminology. In: Twenty-Fifth International Symposium on Fault-Tolerant Computing. Highlights from Twenty-Five Years (June 27-30, 1995).
[7]
Littlewood, B., Strigini, L.: Software reliability and dependability: a roadmap. In: Proceedings of the Conference on The Future of Software Engineering, Limerick, Ireland, pp. 175-188 (2000).
[8]
Leveson, N.: Safeware: System safety and computers. Addison-Wesley, Boston (1995).
[9]
IEEE: IEEE Standard Classification for Software Anomalies. IEEE Std 1044-1993 (December 2, 1993).
[10]
Bassin, K.A., Kratschmer, T., Santhanam, P.: Evaluating software development objectively. IEEE Software 15(6), 66-74 (1998).
[11]
Bassin, K., Santhanam, P.: Managing the maintenance of ported, outsourced, and legacy software via orthogonal defect classification. In: Proceedings. IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (November 7-9, 2001).
[12]
El Emam, K., Wieczorek, I.: The repeatability of code defect classifications. In: Proceedings. The Ninth International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering, pp. 322-333 (November 4-7, 1998).
[13]
Chillarege, R., Bhandari, I.S., Chaar, J.K., Halliday, M.J., Moebus, D.S., Ray, B.K., Wong, M.-Y.: Orthogonal defect classification-a concept for in-process measurements. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 18(11), 943-956 (1992).
[14]
Lutz, R.R., Mikulski, I.C.: Empirical analysis of safety-critical anomalies during operations. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 30(3), 172-180 (2004).
[15]
Paul, R.A., Bastani, F., Ling Yen, I., Challagulla, V.U.B.: Defect-based reliability analysis for mission-critical software. In: COMPSAC 2000. The 24th Annual International Computer Software and Applications Conference, pp. 439-444 (October 25-27, 2000).
[16]
Hamlet, D.: What is software reliability? In: Reggio, G., Astesiano, E., Tarlecki, A. (eds.) Recent Trends in Data Type Specification. LNCS, vol. 906, pp. 169-170. Springer, Heidelberg (1995).
[17]
Avizienis, A., Laprie, J.-C., Randell, B., Landwehr, C.: Basic Concepts and Taxonomy of Dependable and Secure Computing. IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing 1(1) (January-March 2004).
[18]
Vinter, O., Lauesen, S.: Analyzing Requirements Bugs. Software Testing & Quality Engineering Magazine 2-6 (November/December 2000).
[19]
Beizer, B.: Software Testing Techniques, 2nd edn. Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York (1990).
[20]
Zheng, J., Williams, L., Nagappan, N., Snipes, W., Hudepohl, J.P., Vouk, M.A.: On the value of static analysis for fault detection in software. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 32(4), 240-253 (2006).
  1. Investigating the software fault profile of industrial projects to determine process improvement areas: an empirical study

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image Guide Proceedings
    EuroSPI'07: Proceedings of the 14th European conference on Software Process Improvement
    September 2007
    224 pages
    ISBN:3540747656

    Publisher

    Springer-Verlag

    Berlin, Heidelberg

    Publication History

    Published: 26 September 2007

    Qualifiers

    • Article

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • 0
      Total Citations
    • 0
      Total Downloads
    • Downloads (Last 12 months)0
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
    Reflects downloads up to 14 Dec 2024

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    View Options

    View options

    Media

    Figures

    Other

    Tables

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media