Measuring the quality of the development lifecycle process

Abstract

This paper proposes an approach to measuring the efficacy of the development process in terms of its ability to discover defects, and shows the metrics and forms of analysis which can be used to demonstrate this. Every activity in the development process has the capacity to both introduce and reveal defects. The efficacy of the process can be defined in terms of how soon after their introduction defects are discovered. To measure this, defects reported during each step are analysed to determine in which step the defect was introduced. A comparison of this defect distribution by introduction and detection step with the expected distribution indicates which aspects of the process are failing.