Software Process Improvement Methods
Inspections of software code and product documents, for instance, a
requirements specification, has proven to be an effective method for
increasing software quality in an industrial environment. In his licentiate
thesis (December 1999) Anders Subotic has analyzed similarities between
quality engineering for manufacturing industry and software quality work.
It is interesting to note that data from software inspections can be used
at various levels of sophistication. At the level data is used to simply
assess the quality of the product. The most advanced level uses data to
generate knowledge that helps a software engineer to take proactive measures
to increase quality of the products. The levels in between include various
forms of feed-back of data to the development process.
In his analysis Subotic draws on an extensive literature review, case studies
at Ericsson and ABB, and formal experiments performed in a laboratory
environment. The result, which can be regarded as a design hypothesis,
suggests that to make more of the data engineers should inspect smaller pieces
more often. This contradicts some of the current standard and needs to be more
formally tested before being put to practice.
The work has been performed in close collaboration with the quality department
at IKP and has been partly sponsored also by a consortium including Ericsson,
ABB, Astrazeneca, SAAB, Celsius and FMV.
Graduate student: Anders Subotic (lic 1999) (moved to Borneo AB, Stockholm).
Supervisor: Kristian Sandahl.
